Reentry of KOUNOTORI6 was confirmed
Any chance they hit the guillotine command before deorbiting, just in case? What kind of visual or radar object would the 700m tether and small end node, make?
result of Kounotori Integrated Tether Experiments(Japanese)
Quote from: yoichi on 02/06/2017 08:43 amresult of Kounotori Integrated Tether Experiments(Japanese)Many thanks for your posts. Can you provide a short summary of that presentation in English - even just a few lines? Was it a good test?Farewell HTV-6!
New plot: orbital decay of objects ejected from ISS in 2017. Green: ISS. The blue objects are cubesats; the magenta are cubesats which successfully deployed drag devices to accelerate reentry (FREEDOM, EGG, TES5). The red line indicates the ACBM shield lost during an EVA on Mar 30. Coming down faster than cubesats but still pretty slow. The cyan line is an unidentified debris object which separated from ISS on about May 6. Notice its decay rate v similar to the ACBM shield. Note bottom of y axis is 350 km, not 0, to show different decay rates clearly. I know some of you consider this naughty graphing but IDC :-) I'm guessing (wildly) that the ROSA array will decay at a similar rate to the ACBM shield, so will be up for order 6 months. Oh, and of course the little kinks you can see in the green line at top are the ISS reboosting its orbit. There's also some false data for the most recent batch of cubesats near the start of their curves.