Originally posted by NavalFC
reply to post by easynow
But even the NASA docs identify it as a unmanned satellite.
The problem is, the term "satellite - unmanned" says nothing about the identity of this mystery object that was, according to the astronauts themselves, never identified. Heck, most people would agree that the moon is classifiable as an "unmanned satellite". That definition is designed to be entirely vague and to leave the impression that the object was positively identified, which is absolutely not the case. Judging by the evidence available (or the lack of evidence available, depending on how you want to look at it), the Skylab crew did not know what the heck it was, and they admit that it looked far different from other known man-made satellites they observed during the mission as well. The descriptions they provide related to it's appearance only support the "unidentified" conclusion as well.
Also, the ugly fact is that the document I linked above (and re-linked below for ease of reference), the SkyLab III Photographic Index and Scene Identification, actually references frames SL3-118-2138 through 2141 not once, but twice. In the first instance on page 49 that I mentioned earlier, it states that the object in all four frames is a "satellite - unmanned". However, the problem is, the second time the document references these four images (on page 259 of the same PDF), it rather explicitly declares that these four frames are "BLANK". Have a look for yourself. Again, pages 49 and 259 of the PDF are the ones in question. One page says these pics show a "satellite - unmanned", and the other says all four frames are "BLANK".
ntrs.nasa.gov...
This kind of mis-identification/mislabeling/contradictory garbage is FAR more common than most people would think in the NASA archives, and you better believe it is done purposefully in order to help steer attention away from potentially controversial images and essentially "bury" them, making them harder to find or source.
Here is what we do know about this object:
The astronauts state it was "brighter than Jupiter" and "It was reflecting in red light and oscillating at, oh, counting it's period of brightest to dimmest, about ten seconds. We know the object (again, according to the direct observations by the astronauts) did not move more than 10 or 20 degrees over the 10 minutes or so that we watched it. Its orbit was very close to that of our own.
Also, we know that the NORAD Skylab groundtrack shows the station to have been at an altitude of approximately 440kms and traveling at just over 7.5 kilometers a second during this incident time period (over Madagascar and the western edge of the Indian Ocean), and we know that astronaut Owen Garriott noted the variance in time between the object crossing the terminator into darkness and Skylab crossing the terminator to have been 5 to 6 seconds. This means that the astronaut estimations of the range to this object, they "surmised that it was not more than 30 to 50 nautical miles [35 to 58 statute miles or 56 to 93 km] from our location" certainly seems somewhat accurate.
Now, couple all that with the photographs of this object that we have, and it certainly seems that we are indeed talking about one HELL OF A BIG "satellite" here. If it was indeed somewhere around 800 feet in size (as all available evidence suggests it was), then the very idea of NASA pretending that this object can be written off and explained away by simply labeling it as "satellite-unmanned" is an insult to us all.
This object sighted during the Skylab 3 mission by all three astronauts fits the very definition of the word "unidentified". NASA and/or NORAD/DoD may have ID'd it, but they sure as heck havent told us what this HUGE object was!
Cheers!
