Jonathan's Space Report No. 283 1996 Apr 9 Cambridge, MA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Editorial --------- There have been some more problems with the mailer here at CfA - please let me know if you didn't get JSR 282. Shuttle and Mir --------------- The STS-76 mission was meant to be shortened by one day for a landing on Mar 30, but in the event bad weather resulted in a waveoff and Atlantis fired its OMS engines for the deorbit burn at 1223 UTC on Mar 31, for touchdown on runway 22 at Edwards Air Force Base in California at 1328:57 UTC on Mar 31, giving a mission duration of 9 days 5 hr 15 min and 53s. Atlantis was placed atop one of NASA's two SCA Shuttle Carrier Aircraft for the trip back to Florida. The SCA took off from Edwards on Apr 6 but five minutes later one of the Boeing 747's engines showed a fire warning light and the plane returned to Edwards after an abortive 15 minute flight. The engine has been replaced and another try will be made on Apr 11. STS-76 Mission Specialist-4, Dr. Shannon Lucid, remains aboard the Mir complex and is now Mir EO-21 Kosmonavt-Issledovatel' (Cosmonaut-Researcher). Space Shuttle Endeavour (OV-105) was moved from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building on Apr 8, and has been mated to the external tank for STS-77. Recent Launches --------------- The Inmarsat III F1 satellite was launched on Apr 3 by a Lockheed Martin Atlas IIA Centaur rocket. The launch was carried out by Lockheed Martin Commercial Launch Services. The satellite will provide mobile communications services at L-band for the International Maritime Satellite Organization. The satellite is a Lockheed Martin Astro Space AS4000 series satellite with a Matra Marconi Space communications payload and a Star 37 solid apogee motor. The apogee motor was fired prior to April 8, by which time the Inmarsat was being tracked in a 1414.5 minute, 35174 x 35549 km x 2.7 deg drift orbit. LKEI (Lockheed Krunichev Energiya International) launched a Proton-K rocket from Baykonur on Apr 8, carrying an RKK Energiya Blok-DM2 upper stage and the Astra 1F satellite for SES (Societe Europeene des Satellites, a company headquartered in Luxembourg). This is the first commercial launch of a Western-built satellite by a Proton. The Astra 1F is a Hughes HS-601 television broadcasting satellite. The Navstar satellite launched on March 28 was GPS SVN 33. By Mar 30 it had fired its Star 37 apogee motor and was in a 20252 x 20548 km x 54.8 deg orbit. It will be stationed in plane C, slot 2 with code PRN 03. SVN 33 is the satellite which was attacked with an axe by an anti-nuclear activist a couple of years ago. SVN 10, launched in Sep 1984, was boosted to a higher orbit and turned off on Mar 26. Space Command has cataloged a number of fragments in elliptical orbit with a period of 166 minutes which it has associated with the 1966-77 launch, FTV 1352. The spacecraft was a second generation MIDAS infrared early warning development satellite. It is possible that the association is erroneous and the fragments are actually yet more clumps of needles from the West Ford (1963-14) passive communications experiment, which inserted millions of copper dipoles into similar orbits. France's Telecom 1C satellite, launched in 1988, has raised its orbit and is probably retired. It had been stationed at 1.0 deg E. Table of Recent Launches ------------------------ Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Mar 9 0133 REX-II Pegasus XL L1011/Vandenberg Technol. 14A Mar 14 0711 Intelsat 707 Ariane 44LP Kourou ELA2 Comsat 15A Mar 14 1740 Kosmos-2331 Soyuz-U Plesetsk LC43/4 Recon 16A Mar 21 0453 IRS-P3 PSLV Sriharikota Rem.sensing 17A Mar 22 0813 Atlantis Shuttle Kennedy LC39B Spaceship 18A Mar 28 0021 GPS 33 Delta 7925 Canaveral LC17A Navigation 19A Apr 3 2301 Inmarsat III F1 Atlas IIA Canaveral LC36 Comsat 20A Apr 8 2309 Astra 1F Proton-K/DM2 Baykonur Comsat 21A Payloads no longer in orbit -------------------------- Mar 9 Columbia Landed at KSC Mar 12 FSW-1 capsule Reentered over Atlantic Mar 13 ODERACS IIA Reentered Mar 19 TSS-1 Reentered over Middle East? (or Atlantic?) Current Shuttle Processing Status ____________________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission Launch Due OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 2 STS-78 Jun 27 OV-103 Discovery Palmdale OMDP OV-104 Atlantis Edwards STS-76 OV-105 Endeavour VAB Bay 1 STS-77 May 16 ML/SRB/ET/OV stacks ML1/RSRM-54/ET/OV-105 VAB Bay 1 STS-77 ML2/ ML3/ .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for | | | Astrophysics | | | 60 Garden St, MS6 | | | Cambridge MA 02138 | inter : jcm@urania.harvard.edu | | USA | jmcdowell@cfa.harvard.edu | | | | JSR: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/QEDT/jcm/space/jsr/jsr.html | | ftp://sao-ftp.harvard.edu/pub/jcm/space/news/news.* | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'