Rotation Period
18 Mar 2022 = 2.19 seconds (from the Sun Sensor Data)
19 Mar 2022 = 2.18 seconds (from the Sun Sensor Data)
20 Mar 2022 = 2.24 seconds (from the Sun Sensor Data)
21 Mar 2022 = 2.32 seconds (from the Sun Sensor Data)
22 Mar 2022 = 2.41 seconds (from the Sun Sensor Data)
23 Mar 2022 = 2.46 seconds (from the Sun Sensor Data)
24 Mar 2022 = 2.44 seconds (from the Sun Sensor Data)
AO-73 continues spinning about the Z-Z axis with the Z-Z axis slowly precessing about AO-73’s centre of mass in a non-stable attitude.
The graphic below is a small section of a screen shot captured from the 0540utc pass 24th March 2022 and is the Signal History captured by Simon Brown (G4ELI)’s SDR Console.
Simon samples the data at 50 millisecond intervals and produces this graphic as well as storing the data to storage for retrieval as a .CSV for further analysis.
In this instance I did a simple calculation of peaks per second over a period of 220 seconds to calculate the spin for that pass, which equated to 2.54 seconds.
This compares very favourably with 2.44 calculated from the Sun Sensor Data.
73 de Colin VK5HI.