Talk:STEREO

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[edit] Orbital Positions

The original text had the A and B satellites orbiting at 22° fore and aft of the earth. At the same time the orbits are described as having periods of 347 days and 387 days (respectively). These orbits will cause the sats to gradually move away from the earth, so while the 22° positions may be *starting* positions, or *final* positions, or positions at *such-and-such* a date, or even *average* (over the working life) positions, they cannot be *fixed* positions.

True, the sats could be placed in quasi-stable orbits at plus and minus 22°, with the A sat orbiting just far enough inside earth-orbit that the earth's gravity just balances the tendency to advance ahead of the earth, and vice-versa for the B sat, but I don't think that is the case. Anyway, if if this alternate supposition was true, then the orbital periods section would need to be rewritten so that both sats had 365.24 day periods.

Xpi6 10:26, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, I was wondering about that when I wrote the article, and I can't find where New Scientist got the 22° figure from. From the orbital times, it's basically 22°/earth year, which is probably where they got the figure from. JamesHoadley 11:03, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

So then its that they move 22° every year? I wonder could they every be placed in L4/5 orbits--BerserkerBen 19:36, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

The information about the current position of the STEREO spacecrafts can be found here : http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/where.shtml I think they move at about 22&deg every year but their angular speed vary greatly within a year.

The two spacecraft continually move away from the Earth, one ahead of the Earth, the other behind, so that the Earth-Sun-spacecraft angle for each spacecraft increases by around 22 degrees per year. 130.246.132.26 (talk) 15:54, 7 May 2008 (UTC) Chris Davis, Project Scientist, STEREO Heliospheric Imagers.

[edit] Exact Launch Time

I saw the launch live, and one of the mission collaborators said that STEREO launched at 00:52:00.339 (UTC). Can we put this in or is it useless?

[edit] Error in Page Formatting?

There seems to be something wrong with the formatting of the STEREO page. There is content that is (apparently) not available from any of the edit links.