Starship Asterisk*

It is possible that the mystery object is either the satellite or the expended upper stage (Centaur) of the launch tha occurred on 16 December from Cape Canveral.

Commercial satellites use their own propulsion for orbit-raising but it is not known if such a burn occurred this early after spacecraft separation. The other possibility is the extension of the solar panels and a consequent solar reflection flare, but again that is pure speculation on my part.

The AMC-16 mission profile can be found at http://www.ilslaunch.com in the Atlas launch archives.

Close encounters with satellites
Astronomy magazine, 2003

June 14, 1980, an hour after sunset. It was a beautiful Saturday night in Argentina, and many people were out enjoying the clear skies and warm air. Until suddenly, something out of the ordinary appeared.
Pilots and control tower personnel at Newbery Airport in Buenos Aires reported a glowing object hovering in the sky near the airport. Around the same time, a “circular flying mass” chased a family driving home from a visit to Cordoba. They pulled their car off the road and stopped, and reported that the object descended toward them “with vertical and circular movements, leaving a bright trail of whitish smoke,” and then disappeared before their eyes.
Visual descriptions were mostly consistent. “It looked like a full moon but fainter,” one pilot said, “and it was surrounded by a sort of halo.” At Newbery Field a controller called it “a sort of sphere that was dim in the middle and brighter around the edges.”
August 12, 1986, 10 p.m. Hundreds of thousands of people were outside in the eastern half of the United States, looking for Perseid meteors. Many of them had their astronomical instruments and cameras at the ready.
Suddenly a bright, fuzzy spiral, wider than the moon, appeared in the eastern sky, moving from right to left. Sightings occurred from Georgia (Florida was socked in with clouds) to Texas, from Oklahoma City to Quebec, Canada, and all points in between. Descriptions of the object and its motion varied, but a general picture soon emerged. It was called a pinpoint, a moving spiral, a glowing cloud, and “a big ball of fire.” The vice president of the Syracuse Astronomical Society in New York said it resembled a “reflection of the moon off a cloud, but it was very iridescent, very vivid.” Wayne Madea, an amateur astronomer in northern Maine, saw a bright starlike object emit a luminous, rapidly expanding donut-shaped cloud; through a telescope he saw “a pinpoint of light, like a satellite, traveling with the cloud.” In Massachusetts, an amateur astronomer watched the plume perform two full turns in four minutes, painting the spinning spiral as he watched.
Both events, along with countless other similar sightings, left observers stunned and baffled. What had they seen? UFOs?
But some suspected that it was something far less exotic, though still interesting. Richard C. Eaton, a retired engineer in Fayetteville, New York, told a local newspaper he guessed he had seen a cloud that was part of a Japanese rocket launch.
As it turned out, he was right.
Despite the fluid-like or cloud-like texture of the apparitions, the witnesses hadn’t really been seeing anything liquid or gaseous. They had been watching “snowstorms” in space, resulting from artificial satellites.
In Argentina, the mysterious object turned out to be the sunlit propellant cloud dumped from the fourth stage of the Soviet rocket that had just carried Kosmos-1188 into orbit. It was moving from southwest to northeast at an altitude of over 500 miles (900 km), lit by the sun to the west. This satellite was in a “Molniya” orbit, ranging between nearly 400 and 25,000 miles (600 and 40,000 km) of Earth to serve as a communications relay or, as in this case, a missile launch warning system.
In the United States and Canada, observers had witnessed a spray of surplus fuel from the used-up third stage of the Japanese rocket. Their altitude was almost a thousand miles (1,500 km), high enough for it to have been sunlit even though the ground below had been dark for more than an hour.
These kinds of events are happening more and more often, and even better, satellites can sometimes be predicted and photographed. Watching artificial satellites, even if they are just dots of light crossing the sky, can be thrilling. Sometimes they flare brightly when solar wings catch the sun. Sometimes they flash periodically as they tumble. Sometimes they fly in formation with other satellites. And just knowing what they are, or even who’s on board, is usually enough to make it worthwhile. But when the event is unexpected, satellites can leave many people stunned and even frightened.

Cosmic “dumps”
“Propellant dumps” became a standard operation, as rocket engineers realized that leftover fuel inside spent rocket stages could eventually explode, showering nearby space with hundreds of fragments and thus contributing to the mounting “space garbage” problem. So valves on the propellant tanks come open a few minutes after the last scheduled rocket engine firing, and the liquid sprays into space. As it sprays, it gently pushes back on the rocket, sometimes inducing a slow spin.
The liquid droplets shoot out at speeds of more than 300 feet (one hundred meters) per second. In the vacuum of space, the outer layers instantly evaporate, cooling the remaining material until it freezes. It is these little pieces of ice — some of them crystallized like snowflakes, some of them just tiny fragments — lit by the over-the-horizon sun that people on the ground see. If the rocket is slowly tumbling, as it was in August 1986, the stream paints a spiral in the sky. Sometimes the cloud spreads out in all directions, forming a sphere.
The original liquids often were rocket propellants, but sometimes other fluids were involved. During the first manned Mercury orbital flight in 1962, John Glenn described a cloud of “fireflies” around his capsule, which turned out to be snowflakes from water that was emitted from the craft’s cooling system. On Apollo missions, the astronauts dumped urine overboard and marveled at the sight of sunlit yellowish snowflakes (which one spaceman dubbed “the Constellation Urion”). Wastewater from space shuttle missions (and now from the International Space Station) is routinely dumped, and ground observers are often startled to see the shuttle moving across the twilight sky with a “comet tail.”
Scott Young, on the staff of the Manitoba Planetarium in Winnipeg, witnessed a water dump in 1999, while helping a class of astronomy students in an observatory. A scheduled pass of the docked shuttle and station (with a Canadian astronaut aboard) was expected. “About two minutes before the predicted time, a round hazy spot rose in about the right spot and started ascending, trailing a hazy contrail behind it,” explains Young. “As the spot rose higher, the trail got longer and longer, twenty degrees at maximum. It reminded me of a naked-eye view of Comet Hyakutake from light-polluted skies.”
Young admits the sight of the expanding cloud made him anxious, until he could see the docked vehicles rise. But the students were puzzled that the “tail” was preceding the presumed source of the dump, the shuttle itself. The swarm of ice particles that results when water is dumped from a shuttle follows a strange path through space, and this has confused many ground and space observers for years. To prevent the expelled water from recontacting the shuttle, Mission Control usually instructs the crew to direct the stream downward, or even backward against the shuttle’s motion through space. Objects moving backward from the shuttle are then going too slowly to maintain their original altitude, so they slip into lower orbits. By momentum conservation laws, they pick up speed along those new paths and quickly pull ahead of the shuttle, staying slightly below it. The stream often appears to move “out the back” of the shuttle, then curves downward and turns back forward.
Even small particles that separate from a satellite in any direction will follow this path. Weak drag from the ultra-thin air at orbital altitudes affects smaller, less dense particles more strongly, and this reduces their forward speed and drops them naturally into lower, faster orbits. John Glenn noticed this baffling motion when he reported that the “fireflies” he spotted around his Mercury capsule during one sunset were preceding him toward the horizon. They were following “orbital mechanics,” although it took a while for space experts to realize it.
“Space dumps” and the resulting visual phenomena have been going on since the dawn of the space age, but at first they were accidental, and nobody thought they would be visible from the ground. As a result, observations of the phenomenon were rarely written down, and only then in UFO files. But now that these kinds of cloud-like apparitions have been recognized, the logbooks of many observatories and naked-eye astronomers can reveal a wealth of explainable sightings.

“UFOs” Revealed
One typical case came from the Soviet Union. On November 30, 1964, at 6 p.m. local time (an hour after sunset), at the Shamakhinskiy Observatory in the Caucasus Mountains of Azerbaijan, astronomers M. Gadshiyev and K. Gusev saw an object moving from west to north. The head of this object was twice the diameter of the moon. It looked like a ring with a sharp internal edge and a diffuse outer edge. In the center was a starlike object, which appeared as a point even through a telescope. It left a tail that was visible for more than 15 minutes. While the sighting baffled astronomers then, we now know that it correlates with the launching of the Soviet Zond-2 interplanetary probe. It had blasted off from the Baykonur spaceport an hour earlier, circled Earth once, and fired its last stage engine to break free of Earth’s gravity. The apparition seen in Azerbaijan was the post-burn surplus fuel dump.
Other similar instances have never been properly explained. The Japanese H-1 booster that had sparked the eastern U.S. sightings in August 1986 repeated its performance on another launch a year later. As it was completing its first orbit of Earth, the last stage soared through the post-sunset skies of central China and Taiwan. Its propellant was still spraying outward.
Witnesses reported spotting a UFO between about 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. local time. Ground observers reported a glowing object that looked like an oval plate or a comet, with a tail resembling an umbrella. It was orangish in color, and spun clockwise as it flew eastward. News services around the world picked up the story and briefly splashed it across radio, television, and newspapers, all without any mention of the true explanation of the sighting.

Planned Events
These observations had all been accidental, because the space events were unplanned, or followed schedules that weren’t available to the general public. But over the years, both spaceflight operations and the skills and ambitions of amateur ground observers improved. And as some satellite launchings became routine, and rocket burns occurred at higher altitudes, the opportunity arose for advance alerts on widely observable propellant dumps. Observers, forewarned by published schedules and armed with home-computer astronomical software, could look toward the portion of the sky where the dump would occur. It wasn’t just luck any more.
In the summer of 1999, observers the world over geared up to watch four expected launchings of groups of Globalstar communications satellites aboard Delta rockets. Each would blast off from Cape Canaveral, but the upper stage would be fired much higher in the sky, at an altitude of about 900 miles (1,400 km). After deploying the satellites, the rocket was to dump the rest of its propellant through a depletion burn. It was this cloud that observers were eager to watch, and many interesting reports followed the event.
Ted Molczan, an experienced Canadian observer, described what he saw during one launch on July 10. “On time at 10:41:27 UT the depletion burn started. This one was awesome. Soon after the burn started, I made a note that it was turning. At 10:41:56 UT it went between two target stars and I observed the plume easily with the naked eye.”
Jake Rees observed another satellite deployment on August 17, 1999, through binoculars near his home in Burbank, California. The predicted view was to the northeast, at an elevation angle of only 11°, but he still saw it. “It certainly would not have been noticed except by someone looking directly at that spot with binoculars,” he added. “I had to walk to a street bordering on an athletic field near my house to get a view that close to the horizon. Two guys pulled up in a pickup truck in front of their house just as the cloud appeared. I would have told them what I was looking at but they didn’t ask. I guess they just weren’t into observing depletion burns.”
Daniel Deak in St. Bonaventure, Québec, also watched the depletion burn and dump through binoculars. “What I saw was so impressive! It looked like a horn of plenty roughly parallel to the horizon with its right tip curved to reach the rocket, which was at magnitude four or five.” Deak was so intrigued that he then sketched the apparition and posted the image on his Internet home page.
These happy results portend more occasions when predictions of satellite apparitions can be made and disseminated in time for amateur observers to spot them. But most such events will continue to be unexpected, and for most fortuitous observers, unexplainable. Whether by design or by luck, observers who are treated to such spectacles will experience yet another awesome reward for raising their eyes to the skies. X


James E. Oberg observes satellites from his home in Dickinson, Texas.

Anonymous wrote:is it possible that it's a laser created guide star?

I thought of that too - but when Keck on MK is using the laser guide star, you can see it emanating from the dome and making a straight line up through the sky. I'll look through the concam archive and see if I can find an image.

I think that laser ranging from AMOS on Haleakala is done with an infrared laser now, I've never seen it visually in the sky.

Ben wrote:If the APOD animation is a good indication, the object appears to have slowed down rapidly. It starts off as a thin streak and appears to be coming closer as it's aspect increases, and it suddenly seems to slow down. What do you think?

Does the streak's trail getting shorter necessarily mean it slowed down, or could it just mean it was turning (which would look like it was slowing down at the right angle)? After all, lights can be deceiving, you can't get perspective on them.

RAG wrote:I still think it's a blimp;

It was not a blimp. I watched it through my telescope. Stars were visible behind it. Definitely some type of gas cloud. The small satellite to the right, about 3 full moon distances away, paralled the cloud. Hard to say if it slowed down, as all appears relative to the star background.

It was not a UFO. Visual or apparent track remained steady throughout my observation.

Like many projects that have been hid until either a mistake or accident brings them to public knowledge, this is probably another of your "Tax dollars hard at work" story. I vote Project Aurora or whatever else you want to call the SR-71 replacement.

SaKaMoNi wrote:IF this thing actually slowed down as previously suggested, would that not be controlled flight?

It's a perspective effect of the orbit - satellites appear to move slowly low to the horizon, then quickly as they get higher, and nearer, the observer. think of standing by a road. An approaching vehicle at uniform speed appears to move slowly until it passes closest to you, when it seems to move very quickly.

This may also be an effect of the elliptical transfer orbit of the upper launch vehicle. We used to call them Molnya orbits after a Russian communications system.

Have you followed any of the recent activities..?
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/02/07/arms ... index.html

..."the game will also include "near space" aircraft operating above 65,000 feet but below an outer space orbit, which the Air Force sees as a promising new area for intelligence gathering and surveillance. The Air Force hopes to begin operating the first of these new aircraft, such as helium-filled free-floating balloons and remotely controlled glider-like vehicles, within a year."

Between Schriever, Vandenberg, and AMOS (Maui Optical Station) the Pacific test range has lots of "interesting" traffic. All completely deniable, of course.

How about a small comet? Dr. Louis Frank, U. of Iowa, has done alot of research on these mushy snowballs.

Seriously, I'm not even a person who goes to this baord, I was just directed here from Drudge Report, but after reading all the responses I think this was the missle thing ejecting gas. Obviously, I am not versed is all this stuff, but if you were arguing this to a jury, I would be convinced this was a missle.....A-16 thing or whatever. So, I guess, good job.

Live long, and prosper.

RAG wrote:DOES ANYONE KNOW IF THE NAVY FLYS BLIMPS OVER THE ISLANDS?

Yes, I do. No, they don't.

guest wrote:Usually, satellites take a few dozen seconds or, at the most, a couple of minutes to cross the entire sky.

Q: How long does it take for a geostationary satellite to cross the sky?
A: Forever

Curious Chimpee wrote:How about a small comet? Dr. Louis Frank, U. of Iowa, has done alot of research on these mushy snowballs.

If Dr. Frank's "small comets" were visible on the concams, I'd think we'd be seeing them much more often - doesn't he postulate hundreds of these things disintegrating in the atmosphere daily?

Plus, the motion is way too slow for an atmospheric entry, and the lack of (detectable) parallax between the two cameras puts it way outside the atmosphere.

Observer wrote:

RAG wrote:DOES ANYONE KNOW IF THE NAVY FLYS BLIMPS OVER THE ISLANDS?

Yes, I do. No, they don't.

Quoting myself is bad form, but I should correct myself - the Navy does not fly manned, maneuvering blimps here. They may occasionally use a blimp/balloon-borne, tethered instrument platform.

Judging from the outline of it, it looks like a spent rocket body passing thru the satellite field of view.

I have no doubt the object was in a high orbit and dumping fuel along a geosynchronous transfer orbit. The orbital inclination corresponds well with a Kennedy Space Center Launch, and the perspective from Hawaii corresponds with a viewing geometry along the transfer orbit, with the apparent "slowing" indeed being caused by the change of perspective relative to the direction of the orbit. The transfer orbit was to have an 18.2 degree inclination, which seems to correnspond well with the observed track:

http://www.aus-city.com/cgi-bin/ultimat ... 001145;p=0

The observed time of the track at Hawaii corresponds well with a fuel dump from the upper stage occurring after the satellite, with its final goestationary boost module attached, separated at 1355 UT. Also, with launch from Cape Kennedy to a parking orbit of 166x5239 KM occurring at 1207 UT, the arrival of the vehicle over Hawaii at the time observed seems to be in good agreement with orbital dynamics. Further, passage of the vehicle through its ascending node (crossing the equator heading ENE) shortly before observation at Hawaii is also quite consistent.

go to the atlas-16 flight path (previously posted) listed here:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av0 ... track.html

this satellite was comissioned by a satTV company (Echostar's DISH Network) to send a signal obtainable in all 50 states, so it's path would have placed it in a geosynchronous orbit somewhere near north america. if you connect the dots, so to speak, between separation and the US, the satellite would have passed to the southeast of hawaii. meanwhile, the sun would have been just below the horizon in the east (as it was about 4:15 am local time when the pictures were taken), and because of the inclination of the earth on dec 17th (the southern hemisphere tilted towards the sun at ~22 degrees w/ respect to the equator), the cloud of fuel/gas/whatever would have been in a direct line (on the earth's surface) between the sun and hawaii, in perfect position to reflect the sun's rays back down to the telescopes there.

plus, the person IN HAWAII saw, with his own eyes, that the object was somewhat transparent and was near a much smaller, dimmer object.

bye.

You have different pictures taken from at least 2 location ?

Can someone calculate the distance to earth from the object with the following indication :
- 2 pictures taken at the same time from 2 differents location
- the locations from the comcam are known
- on each image, it may be possible to calculate an angles

proceed to this with each image an you get an 3d estimation of the trajectory of the object ...

i hope its posible,so have a lot of fun

Don't be misled by the cigar-shaped images -- the form was spherical, and the time exposure made each captured image look long.

Anybody read my old article from 'Astronomy' yet?

Jim O
http://www.jamesoberg.com

A US hypersonic spy plane. The 'doughnut contrail' the craft makes requires it operate at night, however, the heat signature & sunlight reflection are key giveaways. Flying over Hawaii is a safe testing flight path, & there are emergency landing facilities.

ExNihilo wrote:I have no doubt the object was in a high orbit and dumping fuel along a geosynchronous transfer orbit. The orbital inclination corresponds well with a Kennedy Space Center Launch, and the perspective from Hawaii corresponds with a viewing geometry along the transfer orbit, with the apparent "slowing" indeed being caused by the change of perspective relative to the direction of the orbit. The transfer orbit was to have an 18.2 degree inclination, which seems to correnspond well with the observed track:

http://www.aus-city.com/cgi-bin/ultimat ... 001145;p=0

The observed time of the track at Hawaii corresponds well with a fuel dump from the upper stage occurring after the satellite, with its final goestationary boost module attached, separated at 1355 UT. Also, with launch from Cape Kennedy to a parking orbit of 166x5239 KM occurring at 1207 UT, the arrival of the vehicle over Hawaii at the time observed seems to be in good agreement with orbital dynamics. Further, passage of the vehicle through its ascending node (crossing the equator heading ENE) shortly before observation at Hawaii is also quite consistent.

I was looking at some of the same information just now and coupled with the ground track posted previously, it's pretty clear that the explanation is the AMC-16 launch vehicle dumping fuel. It just fits the numbers, the posted ground track, the pictures, and the eyewitness account

Hawaii is scheduled for a missile defense test in "February". The SM-3 missile IFT-6 integrated flight test is supposed to be carried out 'somewhere' around the islands. They typically launch a target vehicle out of Kauai, then the SM-3 interceptor is launched from an undisclosed location on an Aegis ship in the pacific.

I could be very wrong. I no longer work for this program, but this is my best guess. They have REALLY been keeping the test date secret for some reason - probably to avoid any scrutiny in case of a failed attempt. The NMD (ground based missile defense) recently had a failure that prevented the interceptor from even launching. Pretty sad.

Will try to analyze this to make a better guess????

Anonymous wrote:

ExNihilo wrote:I have no doubt the object was in a high orbit and dumping fuel along a geosynchronous transfer orbit. The orbital inclination corresponds well with a Kennedy Space Center Launch, and the perspective from Hawaii corresponds with a viewing geometry along the transfer orbit, with the apparent "slowing" indeed being caused by the change of perspective relative to the direction of the orbit. The transfer orbit was to have an 18.2 degree inclination, which seems to correnspond well with the observed track:

http://www.aus-city.com/cgi-bin/ultimat ... 001145;p=0

The observed time of the track at Hawaii corresponds well with a fuel dump from the upper stage occurring after the satellite, with its final goestationary boost module attached, separated at 1355 UT. Also, with launch from Cape Kennedy to a parking orbit of 166x5239 KM occurring at 1207 UT, the arrival of the vehicle over Hawaii at the time observed seems to be in good agreement with orbital dynamics. Further, passage of the vehicle through its ascending node (crossing the equator heading ENE) shortly before observation at Hawaii is also quite consistent.

I was looking at some of the same information just now and coupled with the ground track posted previously, it's pretty clear that the explanation is the AMC-16 launch vehicle dumping fuel. It just fits the numbers, the posted ground track, the pictures, and the eyewitness account

There was a similar streak across the sky between San Diego and Santee, California around that date that my husband and I saw around 5:20 pm PST. At first we thought a plane was crashing and there was a fireball with a tail, then we thought it was a comet. We have seen comets before though and this moved faster, yet slower than a meteor. It headed towards Miramar Marine Corps Air Station and then vanished before our eyes. There was nothing ever mentioned on the news radio or media so I gave up on figuring it out. The Drudge Report reminded me of it today when I saw the article.

Although I am not educated in astronomy or physics (I am trained in the law), I have been self-learning, and this website is absolutely a phenomenal resource. My thanks go to the expert scientists who are providing this knowlegde to the laity. For what it is worth, my vote would go to the fuel-dumping theory. Based on what I have read here, that seems to make sense.

Admittedly, I visited this site courtesy of Drudge, but I am glad to have found it. There are some gifted people here, and I look forward to learning more from you all on a regular basis.

I have deleted most/all of the conspiracy theory posts or sarcastic replies to such posts.

Posting your opinion is fine, but keep it clean and keep it sane, please.

-----------------------

As for my own view: I am pretty sure that it is a fuel dump.

If it hasn't been posted already, the estimated altitute for this event is >1000km.