Phobos-Grunt 12/18/11

Unfortunately due to a power interruption, my telescope rebooted right as the tracking began. I had to do a very quick and very dirty computer re-alignment even as Phobos was rising into the sky. Rebooting while the computer was still trying to send commands sent the drives into a nasty series of oscillations, making steady tracking impossible. I trimmed the video to just the segments where Phobos-Grunt passed through the field of view and slowed the video to 1/3rd speed.

Tracked with an 8" LX200 telescope using Brent Boshart's Satellite Tracker program. Recorded with a modified Samsung SDC-435 @ f/10. 1/500 sec exposure, AGC off.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• phobos-grunt
• satellite
• russia

[messierhunter]

@maksphoto78 Sometime around the first half of January most likely. The Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (involving ESA, NASA, Roscosmos, etc) are considering using this probe's orbital decay as a guide to improve computer modeling of orbital decay. UARS and ROSAT were both used as "test objects" as well.

[maksphoto78]

Any idea when it will be re-entering the atmosphere?