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[NovacaineX]

yeah, i'm tired. It's TRMM, i mixed up the names when posting.

I have the date set to December 25th, 2004. Time is 11:34AM EST

[Mima]

LOL no sleep again? What happens if you change the year? This would have to be the hardest of the three to define.

Is it possible that answering this card is going to be dependant on getting the answer to another card in this set, in order to get the date?

[NovacaineX]

I dunno, it doesn't seem to be too hard really, just tedious with all of the possible sattelites. That TRMM one seems to be right on. My biggest question is what does it mean by blue? Which dots on the card are blue??

This puzzle could really use a nice scan of the card

[Mima]

Only part of the orbits are shown of the blue ones (a constellation of satellites). From our picture they run top right to bottom left, and mid-bottom to mid-left. There seem to be a lot of contenders for this one, and no way of choosing between them. Much like the Iridium/Cosmos choice for the red ones.

As we cant see the whole orbit, we can't count all of them. From bottom left & going behind the title strip there are 18, with two on a slightly different path, and there don't appear to be any at all in the section mid-bottom to mid-left. (There are other satellites, but not blue ones). But that might just be the quality of the scan.

[Seej]

Heh, I realised last night, when I was far away from the net and looking at another solar-system model that includes HST, Mir and ISS, that it is of course dependent on the date and time - props to those of you who beat me to it. For everyone who's not sure why this is true, consider that the orbital path is a little like a fixed ring in space and the Earth is turning underneath it. Unless the orbital period of the satellite is exactly 24 hours, so it gets back to the same point over the Earth each day (and it's orbit is way too low for this - looks like the orbital period is gonna be of the order of about 100 minutes), the satellite's gonna pass over lots of different places as the Earth turns. Therefore my answer that the purple satellite is Hubble is only true if at the exact moment this picture was taken Hubble is at that point - the time of day/year that I checked didn't match the picture so I could well have been wrong - sorry.

Of course, as people have mentioned, while we can get the time of day to within an hour or so because of the which bits of the planet are illuminated, and we can tell it's the middle of winter in the Northern hemisphere because of the angle of illumination (the North Pole is in darkness, though since the darkness is a little further up the West coast in the puzzle that it is in NovocaineX's screen capture, perhaps it's a little before or after the solstice), without knowing the year it's impossible to say for certain - all we can do is narrow down the list of satellites to ones which could potentially be on that orbit at that time.

So, in conclusion, the green and purple satellites require more thinking - can we think of any relevant in-game dates around the end of December which may help us with the year? If not I suggest we check for December 2004 to see if it gives us any worthwhile results because it would have been around that time that the cards were being designed.

Yellow is definitely GPS; I've done some more reading and I can't find anything else at that altitude which would look like that.

Which brings me to my next point - does it look to anyone else like only a few of the geostationary satellites are blue and the rest are in white? Could we get confirmation on this or a better scan please? There are individual constellations (eg. Hotbird, which has a few GSO satellites) that make up up the ring of GSO satellites, so perhaps we can narrow this down some more.

Equally, I tried counting the red and blue LEO objects but due to the low resolution it's tricky to pick them out. FWIW there should be 66 satellites if it's Iridium (from this angle we'd be able to see about 35-ish I guess). Again - we need a clearer picture if at all possible please.

Lastly, I may be wrong, but no-one seems to have mentioned that there seem to be blue LEO satellites and GSO satellites - are these all part of the same system? I haven't been able to find anything which matches this but in all honesty I've only spent a few minutes looking.

EDIT: typos and a couple of points I forgot to mention

[Mima]

Thanks for that Seej, I thought we were wrong, but don't know enough about satellites to explain any where near as well. I still hope that maybe one of the other cards in this set will give us the time, date and year so we can figure it out.

[Leeravitz]

This is cold comfort, I suppose, but given that we haven't actually seen 'Freefall' appear in card form per se, but only as a screen capture, do you think we could be missing some further clue that might appear on the finalised card itself??

[sixsidedsquare]

well con sarn it, i don't have no mac.
anyway i could get that to run in windows???

[BrianEnigma]

[Seej]

[NovacaineX]

yeah, we really would need the date for this. I just set it to January 16th, 2004 and they were all in completely different spots. Maybe the date is written in space in light gray or something, but without a higher quality image we can't see it.

[tangohead]

im no expert on satallites but as seej mentioned, not many satallites will continuosly hover over one country, they will go over many countries in a day and will always be moving so perhaps we should rethink this one as it isnt all it seems...

[tanner]

[BrianEnigma]

[tangohead]

ok perhaps we need a map of these then we can match them to where the countries are (see i said i was no expert on satallites lol )