Awatmath.1681 net.space utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!watmath!pcmcgeer Wed Feb 10 00:26:45 1982 Mooning Around... Oops, Brad's right. I goofed. The moon does rotate with respect to the sun, but unfortunately the postion of a satellite that could take advantage of that would be in the L5 position - rather further away than practicable. However, I'm not so sanguine about solving the problem of half time shadow by better design. The angular diameter of the Earth as seen by an 35,000 KM above the equator position is quite enough - comfortably enough - to blot out the Sun. Remember, the Moon is large enough to cover the Sun, and it's 400,000 KM away. Admittedly, the Earth wouldn't block the sun for 12 hours out of every day - six is actually more near correct. A solution would be to put two SPS in high earth orbit, but this involves taking up not one but two geostationary slots, which are pretty valuable. There are only 90 all told, since there has to be a 4 degree separation between any two satellites due to possible interference. Further, a quick glance at a globe will convince the military that one of the SPSs will be over hostile territory permanently. Rick. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.