Jonathan's Space Report No. 558 2005 Dec 10, London ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There have been no new orbital launches since JSR 557. Hayabusa -------- Hayabusa's new attempt to land on asteroid (25143) Itokawa was successful at 2207 UTC on Nov 25. It is now unclear whether the sampler device fired its pellet into Itokawa to collect asteroidal dust. The vehicle took off again shortly afterwards. However, the vehicle then went into safe mode following failures in the thruster system. Limited control over Hayabusa has now been reestablished, but it is not clear whether a return to Earth will be possible. Sinah-1 ------- Henk Smid draws my attention to evidence that the Iranian Sinah-1 satellite uses Polyot's Sterkh satellite bus, which is also intended for use with future Nadezhda satellites. According to Novosti Kosmonavtiki (2001, No. 8, p48) in 2001 plans for Sterkh said it was 80-100 kg, 1.0m high and 0.4m diameter, and would have a design life of 5 years. Sinah-1 has a mass of 160 kg. Surrey Satellite ---------------- This week I visited Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. in Guildford, which is a small city southwest of London and a few miles from the town in which I spent my teenage years. It's a little bizarre to me that quiet little Guildford has become a major center of the British space industry. (Also notable in the UK is the Aerojet propulsion plant, formerly Royal Ordnance, which makes the Leros apogee engines used on large communications satellites and some planetary probes; and the EADS Astrium plant at Stevenage which makes large commercial satellite payloads, although it's not clear to me how much of the spacecraft bus work is done at Stevenage versus the Astrium plants in France. EADS-Astrium is a bigger operation, but its multinational nature obscures the UK contribution - SSTL's activities are more internationally visible as a UK space activity. Perhaps an Astrium reader will let me know what exactly happens at Stevenage, Portsmouth and Poynton.) In 1981 Martin Sweeting of the University of Surrey's engineering department led a project to build a small 52-kg amateur radio satellite, UoSAT-1, which was launched as a piggyback payload on a Delta. Sweeting's team, which became SSTL, have built on this effort and become a leading provider of entry-level satellites to developing nations including Algeria, Nigeria, Thailand and Malaysia. Their latest and much more ambitious satellite is Giove 1, the first test craft for the European Galileo navigation satellite system, which is now awaiting launch at Baykonur. SSTL is in a small brick office building on the University campus; in addition to small clean rooms for solar array fabrication (done in-house to avoid long lead times), propulsion (also done in-house with butane, nitrogen and other propellants) and electronics assembly, a single larger clean room - still very modest in size by big-aerospace-company standards - is used for assembly and integration. When I visited, the Los Alamos Cibola Flight Experiment satellite was being built, with racks for the RapidEye imaging constellation awaiting assembly. Recent launches include another entry in SSTL's Disaster Monitoring Constellation, which is an innovative system with a group of 100-kg class satellites carrying 32-m resolution imagers. Each satellite is owned by a different country - Algeria, Nigeria, China, UK, and Turkey so far - and normally controlled separately, but can be coordinated at SSTL to get rapid imagery of disaster sites like the East Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina. Table of Recent Launches ----------------------- Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Oct 1 0355 Soyuz TMA-7 Soyuz-FG Baykonur LC1 Spaceship 39A Oct 8 1502 Cryosat Rokot Plesetsk LC133 Science F03 Oct 12 0100 Shenzhou 6 CZ-2F Jiuquan Spaceship 40A Oct 13 2232 Syracuse 3A ) Ariane 5GS Kourou ELA3 Comms 41A Galaxy 15 ) Comms 41B Oct 19 1805 USA 186 Titan 4B Vandenberg SLC4E Imaging 42A Oct 27 0652 Topsat ) Kosmos-3M Plesetsk LC132/1 Imaging 43B Beijing-1 ) Imaging 43A Sinah ) Imaging? 43D SSETI Express ) Imaging/Tech 43E Mozhaets-5 ) Tech/Comms 43G UWE-1 ) Comms 43F NCube-2 ) Comms 43E Cubesat XI-V ) Tech 43C Rubin-5 ) Comms 43G Nov 8 1407 Inmarsat 4F-2 Zenit-3SL Odyssey, POR Comms 44A Nov 9 0333 Venus Express Soyuz-Fregat Baykonur LC31 Space probe 45A Nov 16 2346 Spaceway 2 ) Ariane 5ECA Kourou ELA3 Comms 46A Telkom 2 ) Comms 46B .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Somerville MA 02143 | inter : jcm@host.planet4589.org | | USA | jcm@cfa.harvard.edu | | | | JSR: http://www.planet4589.org/jsr.html | | Back issues: http://www.planet4589.org/space/jsr/back | | Subscribe/unsub: mail majordomo@host.planet4589.org, (un)subscribe jsr | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'