Brief GOCE update, 7 November

This morning the average orbital altitude of GOCE had dropped to 181 km. The orbital droprate is now near 6 km per day. There is no sign yet that attitude control is failing.

The nominal re-entry forecast is slightly shifting backwards. My current forecast using Alan Pickup's SatAna and SatEvo software is re-entry in a 1.5 day uncertainty window centered on Nov 11.17 UT. This is assuming that the attitude control will hold until decay (see discussions in previous posts).