Jonathan's Space Report No. 124 1992 Aug 10 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mir ---- The Soyuz TM-14 crew, Aleksandr Viktorenko and Aleksandr Kaleri, returned to Earth on Aug 10 together with French astronaut Michel Tognini. The new Mir crew are Anatoli Solov'yov and Sergey Avdeev. The Soyuz TM-14 spaceship undocked from Mir at 2147 UTC on Aug 9, and landed in Kazakhstan at 0107 UTC on Aug 10. Aleksandr Viktorenko and Aleksandr Kaleri spent 145 d 14 h 13 min in space; Tognini spent 13 d 18 h 59 min in space. Viktorenko has now spent 319 days in space in 3 missions, and is 10th in the all-time cumulative duration records (the US record-holders, the Skylab 4 crew, are in places 31 to 33). Shuttle Mission STS-46 ------------------------ Deployment of the TSS tether was abandoned on Aug 5 at a distance of 220 m when the tether became jammed. Tether retrieval began at 2153 UTC and the TSS was docked on the extendible boom at 2253. The boom was retracted at 2337-2347 UTC. On Aug 6 the orbit of Atlantis was lowered from 295x301 km to 227x235 km for operations with the EOIM experiment (Evaluation of Atomic Oxygen Interactions with Materials). At 1217 UTC on Aug 8 the OMS engines ignited for the 2 min deorbit burn; Atlantis reentered the atmosphere and touched down at Runway 33 at the Kennedy Space Center at 1311.50 UTC on Aug 8. The next mission is STS-47/Endeavour, due in September. The EURECA spacecraft reached an orbit of 466x505 km x 28.5 deg on Aug 6. Launches --------- The launch on Jul 30 is probably an imaging spy satellite, Kosmos-2207, rather than a Resurs-F satellite as I suggested last week. Current Shuttle Processing Status ____________________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 1 STS-52 OV-103 Discovery VAB Bay 2 OMDP OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 2 STS-46 OV-105 Endeavour OPF Bay 3 STS-47 ML/SRB/ET/OV stacks ML1/ Refurbishment area ML2/STS-47/ET VAB Bay 3 ML3/STS-52 VAB Bay 1 .-----------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for | | | Astrophysics | | | 60 Garden St, MS4 | | | Cambridge MA 02138 | inter : mcdowell@cfa.harvard.edu | | USA | | '-----------------------------------------------------------------------------'