Jonathan's Space Report No. 449 2001 Mar 23, Cambridge, MA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mir reentry ----------- On Mar 19 Mir was in a 224 x 230 km x 51.6 deg orbit. On Mar 23 at 0033 UTC Progress M1-5 carried out the first small DPO burn to lower Mir's orbit from 212 x 218 km to 190 x 219 km. A second small burn began at 0201 UTC and put Mir in a 150 x 215 km orbit. The main deorbit burn began at 0507 UTC, lowering perigee to less than 80 km. At 0550 UTC observers in Fiji reported seeing multiple bright reentry bodies passing overhead, confirming that the station had broken up by that time. The impact zone is around 160W 40S. DOS 7 (Long-duration Orbital Station 7), named Mir after launch in Feb 1986, was the 10th Soviet space station to leave the pad. It was visited by 111 spacecraft. Astronauts occupied it for 4591 days and made 79 spacewalks from it. The longest continuous occupation (neglecting brief absences during Soyuz redockings where the crew remained within a few hundred meters of the station) was 11 days short of a decade. The duration record of 437 days for a single flight was set by Valeriy Polyakov onboard Mir in 1994-1995. The components of Mir at the time of reentry were: Designations Name Launch date DOS 7 17KS No 127-1 "Mir" Feb 1986 TsM-E 37KE No 010 "Kvant" Mar 1987 TsM-D 77KS No 171-1 "Kvant-2" Nov 1989 TsM-T 77KS No 172-1 "Kristall" May 1990 TsM-O 77KS No 173-1 "Spektr" May 1995 SO 316GK No. 1 Stikovochniy Otsek Nov 1995 TsM-I 77KS No 174-1 "Priroda" Apr 1996 7K-TGM No. 254 "Progress M1-5" Jan 2001 Shuttle and Stations -------------------- Discovery was launched on mission STS-102 (Space Station flight 5A.1) on Mar 8 at 1142:09 UTC. At 1150 UTC the main engines cut off and the external tank separated; orbiter and external tank were at this point in a 60 x 222 km x 51.6 deg orbit. The orbiter fired its OMS engines at 1221 UTC to raise the orbit to 185 x 219 km, while ET-107 fell back towards the Pacific. Launch mass of Discovery was probably around 114000 kg; the value in the NASA press kit is clearly incorrect. Discovery docked with the PMA-2 port on the Station at 0639 UTC on Mar 10. According to the spaceflightnow.com story by Bill Harwood, Usachyov became a member of the ISS crew at 1034 UTC. On Mar 11 Jim Voss and Susan Helms made a spacewalk from Discovery's airlock. A PAD device used to attach equipment to the RMS arm floated free and Voss retrieved a spare one from Unity, putting the walk behind schedule. The PAD has been cataloged by Space Command as satellite 26723, international designation 2001-010B. The astronauts installed the Lab Cradle Assembly and the Rigid Umbilical on Destiny and disconnected the umbilicals connecting the PMA-3 docking port to Unity. The astronauts then spent two-and-a-half hours back in the depressurized airlock in case their help was needed during the move of PMA-3. Thomas used the RMS arm to unberth PMA-3 from the nadir port on Unity and relocated it to the port port location, freeing up the nadir for the MPLM. The airlock was depressurized at 0508 UTC and repressurized at 1408 UTC. Duration was 9h00m (depress/repress), about 6h16m (ingress/egress), 8h54m (hatch open/close), and 8h56m (NASA rule). The Leonardo module was unberthed from the payload bay at 0410 UTC on Mar 12 and berthed at Unity's nadir port at 0606 UTC. Mar 13 saw the second spacewalk, by Andy Thomas and Paul Richards. The airlock was depressurized at 0518 UTC and the hatch opened at 0520 UTC. The astronauts took the External Stowage Platform from the ICC carrier to the port side of the Destiny module, and then installed the spare Pump Flow Control System on it. The ESP is used to store on-orbit-spare equipment. Next they hooked up cables on the robot arm's umbilical, and travelled up to the top of the P6 tower to fix a solar array latch - it just needed a good thump - and inspect the FPP experiment. The astronauts returned to the airlock at 1132 UTC and began repressurizing at 1144 UTC. Duration was 6h26m (depress/repress), 5h58m (egress/ingress), 6h 13m (hatch open/close), or 6h21m (NASA rules). A minute into airlock repressurization, Shannon Lucid in Houston called up to tell the crew to halt the repress. At 1149 the airlock began depressurizing again and at 1155 it was again at zero. A detailed test objective, DTO 257, was testing the effects of firing Shuttle RCS jets while docked to the ISS, and controllers wanted data with the airlock at vacuum, since that changes the dynamics. The airlock was finally repressurized again at 1209 UTC. Since the initial repressurization brought the airlock up to 120 mbar (1.8 psi) and I arbitrarily set 100 mbar as my boundary for delimiting a 'depressurized operation', I count the 20-minute period from 1150 to 1209 as a separate depress op. NASA did not count the new depressurization as an EVA. The hatch remained closed and the astronauts remained inside the airlock. Leonardo was removed from Unity at 1042 UTC on Mar 1 and reberthed around 1204 UTC. At 0232 UTC on Mar 19 command of ISS was transferred to Expedition 2 and the hatches were closed. Discovery undocked at 0432 UTC and flew once around the station before departing at 0548 UTC. ISS mass after undocking was 115527 kg. The OMS engines fired for the deorbit burn at 0625 UTC on Mar 21, and Discovery touched down on runway 15 at Kennedy Space Center at 0731 UTC. Recent Launches --------------- The first Ariane 5 launch of the year took place on Mar 8. The cryogenic main stage entered a marginal orbit with apogee around 1000 km and reentered over the Pacific on its first orbit. The EPS upper stage placed the two payloads in geostationary transfer orbit. Payloads were EUTELSAT's Eurobird and the Japanese BSAT-2a. Eurobird is a Spacebus 3000B3 built by Alcatel (Cannes). Dry mass is probably around 1300 kg. The satellite has an Astrium S400 bipropellant engine. BSAT-2a is the second Orbital STAR-class television broadcasting satellite. Its launch mass is 1317 kg; dry mass is 535 kg. The satellite has a Thiokol Star 30CBP solid apogee motor. Joe Hopkins reports that the new BSTAR STAR-class satellites are a new design replacing the earlier Starbus type satellite of which only one (Cakrawarta 1) was launched. BSAT Corp. (Broadcasting Satellite System Corp.) earlier launched HS-376 satellites BSAT 1a and 1b, replacing the government's BS series which began Japanese direct broadcast services in 1978. The XM-2 "Rock" satellite was launched on Mar 18. XM Radio's second satellite, XM-1 "Roll" will be launched later this year. The XM Radio satellites will provide digital radio entertainment broadcast to the US. The satellites are Boeing 702 models. A Boeing Sea Launch Zenit-3SL took off from the Odyssey floating launch platform at 154W 0N in the Pacific. The two-stage Zenit put the Blok DM in a suborbital trajectory with a 190 km apogee; the DM first burn went to a 180 x 990 km x 1.3 deg orbit, with the second burn delivering Rock to geostationary transfer orbit. A more accurate time for NEAR's landing on (433) Eros is 1944:17 UTC on Feb 12, with signal receipt on Earth at 2001:52 UTC. Table of Recent Launches ----------------------- Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Feb 7 2306 Sicral ) Ariane 44L Kourou ELA2 Commsat 05A Skynet 4F ) Commsat 05B Feb 7 2313 Atlantis (STS-98))Space Shuttle Kennedy LC39A Spaceship 06A Destiny ) Module 06B Feb 20 0848 Odin Start-1 Svobodniy Astronomy 07A Feb 26 0809 Progress M-44 Soyuz-U Baykonur LC1 Cargo 08A Feb 27 2120 Milstar DFS 4 Titan Centaur Canaveral SLC40 Commsat 09A Mar 8 1142 Discovery (STS-102) Shuttle Kennedy LC39B Spaceship 10A Leonardo Module Mar 8 2251 Eurobird ) Ariane 5G Kourou ELA3 Commsat 11A BSAT-2a ) Commsat 11B Mar 18 2233 XM-2 Rock Zenit-3SL Odyssey,Pacific Commsat 12A Current Shuttle Processing Status _________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission Launch Due OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 1 STS-109 2001 Nov 19 HST SM-3B OV-103 Discovery OPF Bay 2 STS-105 2001 Jul 12 ISS 7A.1 OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 3 STS-104 2001 Jun 7 ISS 7A OV-105 Endeavour LC39A STS-100 2001 Apr 19 ISS 6A .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for | | | Astrophysics | | | 60 Garden St, MS6 | | | Cambridge MA 02138 | inter : jcm@cfa.harvard.edu | | USA | jmcdowell@cfa.harvard.edu | | | | JSR: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~jcm/space/jsr/jsr.html | | Back issues: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~jcm/space/jsr/back | | Subscribe/unsub: mail majordomo@head-cfa.harvard.edu, (un)subscribe jsr | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'