are these really Alien Probes ? | |
Anonymous Coward (OP) User ID: 39725421 United States 05/12/2013 04:45 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
Anonymous Coward (OP) User ID: 39725421 United States 05/12/2013 05:00 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Once we had a preliminary orbit, we found that the object would pass within about 0.003 AU of Earth in early December! We were immediately suspicious that the object might be manmade. On November 8, I already suggested to Brian Marsden that perhaps it might be a Saturn IVB stage, but it was only a wild guess at trying to explain the Earth-like orbit. The disconcerting thing is that an object in such an orbit would not last very long - how could it be natural? One possibility we discused was tht it might be a recently escaped Earth-Sun trojan asteroid. I soon noted that the archive of last known state vectors for Apollo hardware was not very helpful in determining where they might be now. Soon, the orbit was good enough to say with some precision where it had been over the last 30 years and it. Marsden integrated the orbit backwards, hoping to improve the predictions for an attempt to observe 1991 VG with radar by linking it to a manmade spacecraft. He found that it had been in the vicinity of Earth last in about 1973 or 1974, but only got within about 0.07AU. That suggested the Helios A spacecraft booster, a Centaur upper stage. Jonathan McDowell contacted General Dynamics and found out that that booster was put back into a Geocentric orbit after dumping the Helios Spacecraft. [link to www.satobs.org] |
Anonymous Coward (OP) User ID: 39725421 United States 05/12/2013 05:41 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | [link to articles.adsabs.harvard.edu] |