Jonathan's Space Report No. 473 2002 Mar 1 Cambridge, MA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shuttle and Station -------------------- Carl Walz and Dan Bursch made a spacewalk on Feb 20 using the Station's Quest airlock. Depressurization was at around 1134 UTC and repressurization was at 1725 UTC. The spacewalk involved doing some preparatory work with cables and thermal covers in advance of the spacewalks planned for STS-110 and the installation of the S0 truss. It was also intended to check out proper functioning of the Quest airlock, which had some minor problems on its first use in Jul 2001. The last two Expedition-4 spacewalks were made from the Russian Pirs airlock. Launch of STS-109 is scheduled for Mar 1. Recent Launches --------------- The first Lockheed Martin Astronautics Atlas 3B was launched on Feb 21. The Atlas 3B features the new Common Centaur stretched two-engine upper stage, also planned for use on the Atlas 5. Atlas AC-204 placed the Echostar 7 communications satellite in geostationary transfer orbit. The Atlas III first stage, using a Russian RD-180 main engine, fired first, followed by the first burn of the Centaur, which entered a 185 x 193 km x 28.1 deg parking orbit. At 1305 UTC the Centaur burned again to achieve the final 245 x 57060 km x 22.6 deg transfer orbit and separated from Echostar. Arianespace launched an Ariane 44L from Kourou on Feb 23. The Loral FS-1300HL-class Intelsat 904 satellite it placed in a 176 x 35812 km x 7.0 deg geostationary transfer orbit will be used for Indian Ocean region communications. Intelsat 904 has a dry mass of 2350 kg and carries a further 2330 kg of fuel. Arianespace had another success on Mar 1 when the Ariane 5 returned to flight with mission V145/vehicle 511. This vehicle, the first Ariane 5 to use the 17-m Long Fairing and the first to launch north from Kourou, placed the European Space Agency's Envisat polar platform in orbit. Originally envisaged as an automated polar orbiting segment of the Space Station, and later descoped to become something like the European equivalent of NASA's Earth Observing System, Envisat uses a new modular satellite bus built at Matra Marconi Space/Bristol, now shut down - final integration was done at ESTEC in the Netherlands. The service module (SVM) is based on the SPOT 4 design; prime contractor is Astrium (Dornier). Envisat has a dry mass of 7911 kg and carries 300 kg of hydrazine for orbit adjust. The active C-band phased array ASAR radar imaging antenna is 1.3 x 10m in size; Envisat also carries atmospheric radiometers and spectrometers and a radar altimeter. The V145 flight profile was quite different from earlier Ariane 5 GTO launches where the EPC core stage usually reached a marginal orbit. In this case EPC separation at 350 km high 10 min after launch left the EPC in a suborbital trajectory impacting in the Arctic; the EPS final stage with Envisat only achieved a positive perigee at 22 minutes after launch, with a circular 790 km sun-synchronous orbit reached at 25 min after launch. Kosmos-2387 was launched on Feb 25 from Plesetsk. The satellite, built by TsSKB-Progress of Samara, is a Kobal't-class imaging spy satellite. It carries two small film capsules and a large reentry module. The KVR (Russian Space Forces) launched it on a Soyuz-U into a 165 x 344 km x 67.1 deg orbit. The previous mission of this class, Kosmos-2377, flew from May to October last year. Table of Recent Launches ----------------------- Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Jan 16 0030 Milstar FLT-5 Titan Centaur Canaveral SLC40 Comms 01A Jan 23 2347 Insat 3C Ariane 42L Kourou ELA2 Comms 02A Feb 4 0245 MDS-1 ) H-2A Tanegashima Tech 03A DASH ) Tech 03 VEP-3 ) Tech 03 Feb 5 2058 HESSI Pegasus XL Canaveral Astronomy 04A Feb 11 1743 Iridium ) Delta 7920 Vandenberg SLC2W Comms 05A Iridium ) 05B Iridium ) 05C Iridium ) 05D Iridium ) 05E Feb 21 1243 Echostar 7 Atlas 3B Canaveral SLC36B Comms 06A Feb 23 0659 Intelsat 904 Ariane 44L Kourou ELA2 Comms 07A Feb 25 1726 Kosmos-2387 Soyuz-U Plesetsk LC43/3 Imaging 08A Mar 1 0108 Envisat Ariane 5G Kourou ELA3 Rem.Sensing Current Shuttle Processing Status _________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission Launch Due OV-102 Columbia LC39A STS-109 2002 Mar 1 HST SM-3B OV-103 Discovery VAB Maintenance OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 2? STS-110 2002 Apr 4 ISS 8A OV-105 Endeavour OPF Bay 1? STS-111 2002 May 2 ISS UF-2 .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | 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 | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'