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On statistics of changes in rates of drift among uncontrolled geostationary objects

Sochilina, Alla S. 1, Grigoriev, Konstantin V. 1, Vershkov, Andrei N. 1, Kiladze, Rolan I. 1, Hoots, Felix R. 1, France, Richard1
Affiliation data not available1

Document details

Publishing year2001 PublisherESA Publishing typeConference Name of conference3rd European Conference on Space Debris
Pagesn/a Volume
3
Issue
1
Editors
H. Lacoste

Abstract

The comparison of the geostationary uncontrolled object long-term orbital evolution with NASA Two-Line-Elements of US Space Commands has been shown, that many of them have significant systematic discrepancies in longitudes. These discrepancies can be explained by sharp changes of satellite rate of drifts on some moments of time. At present there are more than a hundred of such objects, some of them have repeated changes. For instance, the objects 68050J Transtage 12, 79035E Raduga 5, apogee motor and exploded satellites (67066G Transtage 11 and 77092A Ekran 2) have no less than 3-5 changes. The values of the changes are in the limits 0.0002-0.01 °/day. The studies of changes with other orbital data and even with the optical observations confirmed this phenomenon. For explanation of it the statistic of all these changes for long time interval is necessary. The preliminary hypothesis, which could explain these changes, is a collision of satellite with space debris or its micro explosion, as soon as usual explosion of satellite calls the similar changes of rate close to 0.2-1.0 °/day only. For the beginning of statistic accumulation the studies of long-term evolution for all uncontrolled geostationary objects are fulfilled over the time interval 1993 - 2000 years. As the result of this work is a list of objects with their orbital data and the values of changes of their rate on corresponding time moments.

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