Author Topic: LIVE: Soyuz-2-1A - Cosmos 2495 (Kobalt-M) – Plesetsk – May 6, 2014 (1349UTC)  (Read 52620 times)

Offline jcm

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Just been playing with some numbers.

No two-lines were issued for September 3rd, so maybe the satellite was recalled the previous day with a landing at about 18:26 UTC?   That would mean that the final TLE to be issued is also the final equator crossing of the satellite.

Alternatively, the satellite might have landed about 18:11 UTC on September 3rd with no TLEs being issued during the day.

These figures assume a final equator crossing between 40-45 deg E which is low but not unprecedented for this orbital inclination.

Note that the space-track decay message has a MSG_EPOCH of 0748 UTC Sep 3. So I think it must be
a Sep 2 landing; I get 1828 UTC so pretty good agreement with you; equator crossing at 46E.

 - Jonathan
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Jonathan McDowell
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Offline jcm

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Now if only we had recovery dates for the small SpK film capsules!
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Jonathan McDowell
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Offline Phillip Clark

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The following has been posted on the SEESAT mailing list by Björn Gimle:

Rob Matson sent me the following info, of which I was not aware otherwise:

...I do occasionally check the archives to see if interesting events that
I’m aware of have been brought up there. I was VERY surprised to see that
no one has mentioned the spectacular administrative decay of Cosmos 2495
three nights ago over Colorado and Wyoming!
It was witnessed by hundreds of people and the debris cloud is very
impressive on Doppler radar (a snapshot of which I’ve attached). That
drifting debris cloud is visible for over half an hour in radar images from
Denver and Cheyenne. A little surprising to me that the Russians would
command destructive reentry to occur over land rather than ocean –
especially over CONUS – when some pieces of the 6.7-ton satellite will
likely survive to the ground.
...
The reentry occurred at around 10:30 *pm* local time Sep.2, so not a daytime
reentry.  Feel free to post my comments to SeeSat with my name.
I'll be a little surprised if there wasn't at least one list member who
witnessed it.


So, was the main descent module from Cosmos 2495 recovered inside Russia or did it decay from orbit?
I've always been crazy but it's kept me from going insane - WJ.

Offline Galactic Penguin SST

The following has been posted on the SEESAT mailing list by Björn Gimle:

Rob Matson sent me the following info, of which I was not aware otherwise:

...I do occasionally check the archives to see if interesting events that
I’m aware of have been brought up there. I was VERY surprised to see that
no one has mentioned the spectacular administrative decay of Cosmos 2495
three nights ago over Colorado and Wyoming!
It was witnessed by hundreds of people and the debris cloud is very
impressive on Doppler radar (a snapshot of which I’ve attached). That
drifting debris cloud is visible for over half an hour in radar images from
Denver and Cheyenne. A little surprising to me that the Russians would
command destructive reentry to occur over land rather than ocean –
especially over CONUS – when some pieces of the 6.7-ton satellite will
likely survive to the ground.
...
The reentry occurred at around 10:30 *pm* local time Sep.2, so not a daytime
reentry.  Feel free to post my comments to SeeSat with my name.
I'll be a little surprised if there wasn't at least one list member who
witnessed it.


So, was the main descent module from Cosmos 2495 recovered inside Russia or did it decay from orbit?

Maybe that's why the de-orbit position wasn't reported by, e.g. the Aerospace Group?

The timing seems to be about 10 hours after the nominal de-orbit time - so if this is confirmed that means that the de-orbiting was somehow goofed up?  ::)
Astronomy & spaceflight geek penguin. In a relationship w/ Space Shuttle Discovery. Current Priority: Chasing the Chinese Spaceflight Wonder Egg & A Certain Chinese Mars Rover

Offline Phillip Clark

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The following has recently  been posted to the SEESAT mailing list by Thomas Ashcraft:

I posted a video of ( likely ) Cosmos 2495 as it passed over New Mexico
on September 03, 2014, from 0431 UT to 0433 UT.



Brief and preliminary notes:

September 03 2014  -  0431 to 0433 UT

I think this is the Cosmos 2495 satellite descent and decay as it was
passing from south to north over New Mexico just before it reentered the
ionosphere over Colorado. I am not sure if it is engaging the ionosphere
at this point and burning. ? Maybe it is just starting to make friction
? Perhaps others can analyze this and let me know.

This event was captured on my Sentinel all-sky camera which is primarily
a fireball camera that I merged with my VHF forward scatter radio array.
This particular capture was baffling to me as it sounded like a
satellite radio reflection but it was an odd reception. I actually
thought it might have been some sort of airplane since its light
appeared to fluctuate especially as it traveled north of my location. I
even thought it might have been some sort of a secret experimental
aircraft (like the Aurora project plane that used to be sighted over New
Mexico many years ago.)

In any case, I luckily saved the video and put it into my inconclusive
file, later to find out by reading the seesat list that it was likely
the Cosmos 2495 re-entry.

Radio-wise: Note the dopplering scatter reflections in the first fifty
seconds. The analog scatter transmitters were likely Mexican tv stations
broadcasting at 61.250 MHz CW and 83.250 MHz CW. Listen close in stereo.

Any further elucidation of this event is welcome. I an an observer and
recorder but not a reentry analyst.

Any corrections to my notes and text is welcomed.

(Also, sorry for the dim quality of video. My old camera is pretty worn
out and the white dots are not stars but rather dead pixels.  Yet it is
still a pretty good fireball capture system.

Thomas Ashcraft
ashcraft (at) heliotown.com
Radio Fireball Observatory
New Mexico

I've always been crazy but it's kept me from going insane - WJ.

Offline jcm

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Very strange.

Could be a nonstandard southbound recovery  on that orbit with the service module somehow skipping on the atmosphere and doing a partial orbit?
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Jonathan McDowell
http://planet4589.org

Offline B. Hendrickx

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Offline Star One

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Excellent analysis here :

http://www.spaceflight101.com/kosmos-2495-re-entry.html

If the film capsule has come down intact in North America that could be interesting. Would the Russian's ask for it back, not so ridiculous as it might seem as the US formally asked for the RQ-170 drone back that went down in Iran.

Offline Phillip Clark

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Maybe it's old age and stupidity coupled with my sight issues, but the debris path isn't parallel with the orbital path for Cosmos 2495 and it's to the east.   I wonder if the satellite came down as planned and by coincidence something else came into the atmosphere and broke up, only to be mistake for Cosmos 2495.   The odds of this are slim but they are non-zero.
I've always been crazy but it's kept me from going insane - WJ.

Offline Danderman

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http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=19386.0

A thread about a similar incident, where the service module came down in Mexico, although the return capsule presumably landed in Russia.

Offline input~2

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Offline Galactic Penguin SST

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=19386.0

A thread about a similar incident, where the service module came down in Mexico, although the return capsule presumably landed in Russia.

Maybe this time it's something like this too - apparently fireballs were seen at around the nominal landing time (around 18:15 UTC Sep. 2) across western Kazakhstan and southern Russia, consistent with the track of K-2495 from the south on a nominal de-orbiting.

A list of videos of that fireball can be found here.

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Offline Lee Jay

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You're not going to believe this, but I caught video of this thing on my video cameras at work (I think).

EDIT:  Yep...looks like I got it from three angles.
« Last Edit: 09/09/2014 10:37 pm by Lee Jay »

Offline Phillip Clark

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Posting by Ted Molczan on SEESAT.   I think that this just about wraps it up and whatever was seen over the USA was *not* Cosmos 2495.


I am now confident that the fireball seen over the western U.S. on 2014 Sep 03 near 04:33 UTC was not Cosmos 2495
(14025A / 39732). That became improbable when it was recognized that the slow-moving fireball seen more than 10 h
earlier over Western Kazakhstan and Orenburg region (Russia) must have been Cosmos 2495. For it to have been the cause
of both fireballs would have required an incomplete de-orbit burn.

I tested that hypothesis by creating a TLE at the approximate time of the de-orbit burn (2014 Sep 02 17:40 UTC), that
when it reached Kazakhstan ~45 min later, would have just reached the altitude when re-entering objects become
self-luminous, which I normally take to be 96 km. I then fit a decay term by trial and error using Satevo, that would
have resulted in re-entry on Sep 03 near 04:40 UTC, several minutes after the U.S. fireball sighting.

The resulting de-orbit TLE, shown below, passes over Western Kazakhstan at about 18:14 UTC, at about 96 km altitude:

1 70000U          14245.73611112  .17600000  00000-0  80777-4 0    05
2 70000  81.3770 299.0950 0128000  52.4336 214.0000 16.37300000    00

This is the final TLE before re-entry of the above orbit, propagated by Satevo:

1 70000U          14246.17706951 1.15185463  27284 2  16568-3 0 90009
2 70000  81.3675 298.4863 0025344  50.6326 309.5915 16.65049125    77

It passes over the area of the fireball sighting in the U.S. on Sep 03 near 04:24 UTC, about 10 min earlier than the
fireball was seen. This represents the best-case scenario, and it depends on favourable, but unrealistic assumptions.

No effort was made to estimate the decay term from the object's actual ballistic coefficient. Had this been done, I
suspect the decay term would have been significantly greater, causing the object to decay well before it reached the
U.S. Based on the videos of the Kazakhstan fireball, the re-entry probably had progressed well below 96 km. Had a more
realistic altitude been chosen, the case for survival to reach the U.S. would be further weakened.

My preliminary analysis of the possibility that the U.S. fireball was due to uncatalogued debris jettisoned just prior
to the de-orbit burn tends to support, but does not prove that hypothesis.

I propagated the last known TLE to the approximate time of the de-orbit burn, and assumed that the orbit of the
jettisoned debris would have differed only in rate of decay. I then fit a decay term by trial and error using Satevo,
that would have resulted in re-entry on Sep 03 near 04:40 UTC, several minutes after the U.S. fireball sighting:

1 70001U          14245.73611113  .13400000  00000-0  78682-2 0    01
2 70001  81.3770 299.0950 0034344 130.9033 134.4989 16.17169265    09

This is the final TLE before re-entry of the above orbit, propagated by Satevo:

1 70001U          14246.18294601 2.42452645  43066 2  41010-2 0 90000
2 70001  81.3681 298.4965 0008820 129.1327 230.9457 16.47601197    72

This orbit passed over the region of the U.S. fireball sightings about one minute too early. Since the underlying model
of TLEs (SGP4) is not designed to propagate the final descent accurately, I made lower altitude versions of the above,
closer to the likely altitude of the fireball. I was able to obtain a reasonably good agreement with the trajectory data
reported by the Cloudbait observatory, albeit about one minute early. The result is sufficiently close to warrant a more
rigorous analysis. The meteor explanation is not ruled out.

It is necessary to review the previous eight Kobal't-M launches to learn as much as possible about the debris jettisoned
prior to the de-orbit burn. Of particular interest is the typical time of jettison relative the de-orbit burn, the
delta-V of separation, and the ballistic coefficient. The number of pieces of debris catalogued has ranged between zero
and three. The zeros may have been the result of decay before cataloguing could occur.

Ted Molczan

I've always been crazy but it's kept me from going insane - WJ.

Offline osiossim

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Several different places in Russian territory...From NK forum...












« Last Edit: 09/10/2014 07:24 pm by osiossim »

Offline Nicolas PILLET

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Nicolas PILLET
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Offline Targeteer

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This appears to be quoted from and an official JSPOC release but I can't find it

http://en.ria.ru/russia/20140912/192867400/US-Strategic-Command-Confident-About-Russian-Military-Satellite.html

MOSCOW, September 12 (RIA Novosti) - Russian reconnaissance satellite Kosmos-2495 re-entered the atmosphere and crashed last week, a spokesman for the US Strategic Command told RIA Novosti on Friday.

"US Strategic Command's Joint Functional Component Command for Space [JFCC Space] through the Joint Space Operations Center [JSpOC] assesses with high confidence that Kosmos-2495 re-entered the atmosphere and was removed from the US satellite catalog as a decayed object on September 3," the spokesman said.

The Russian Defense Ministry previously denied media reports of a Russian military satellite allegedly exploding over the territory of the United States.

On September 3, the American Meteor Society published more than 30 reports from alleged eyewitnesses who claimed to observe a big fireball streaking across the sky. The spaceflight101.com website, dedicated to covering spaceflight events with special focus on the technical aspects of space flight, suggested it could have been Kosmos-2495.

Kosmos-2495 was launched on May 6, 2014. It is also known as reconnaissance satellite Kobalt-M, an operational member of the Yantar series of Russian satellites. It weighs 6.6 tons, operates on a low Earth orbit and is equipped with a film camera.

JFCC Space is responsible for integrated space operations in order to support national and military objectives.

JSpOC tracks more than 17,000 objects in space, providing information on space objects and debris to satellite owners and operators.
Best quote heard during an inspection, "I was unaware that I was the only one who was aware."

Offline gwiz

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Further analysis from Ted Molczan:

...I am now confident that the object that re-entered was uncatalogued debris of Cosmos 2495...
http://www.satobs.org/seesat/Sep-2014/0110.html

Offline Star One

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Offline Stan Black

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Was the fairing kept attached to the rocket for longer; like they did with Progress M-25M?
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=28784.msg1289645#msg1289645

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