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www.southgatearc.org
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Winners of Cute 1.7 re-entry announcedThe joint winners of the competion to predict when Amateur Radio satellite Cute 1.7 (CO-56) would re-enter the atmosphere have been announced as Ib OZ1MY and David G0MRF. Cute-1.7+ APD was launched on the JAXA M-V-#8 rocket from the Kagoshima Space Center on February 21, 2006 into a 711 x 299 km elliptical orbit. It re-entered the Earth atmosphere on October 25, 2009 On the AMSAT Bulletin Board John G7HIA writes Winners Declared It seems that when a satellite, reaches an altitude as low as about 170km they will be down very quickly. According to Space Track elements, and InstanTrak tracking software Cute was still orbiting when the perigee was below 150 Km. My theory is that cubesats stay in orbit longer because they have a large mass relative to their very small cross section and so experience far more drag than bulkier objects. Using that idea I ran the last element set for several orbits and made an arbitrary decision that re-entry probably took place at a perigee of 130Km or so thus putting re-entry pretty much dead centre between two competition entries. I therefore declare Ib OZ1MY and David G0MRF as joint winners !!! On receipt of current postal addresses I will mail out a patch kit to each of the lucky winners. Thanks to Ib, David and everyone else who took part, it was fun to plot the curves and I learned a bit about atmospheric density and solar flux.
73 John G7HIA
Cute-1.7 - CO-56 IPS Radio and Space Services, have a useful paper on satellite orbital decay calculations. Thanks to Ken GW1FKY for for the link IPS Radio and Space Services Orbital Decay Calculator
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