Jonathan's Space Report May 22 1991 (no.74) ---------------------------------------------------- Discovery landed on runway 15 at Kennedy Space Center at 1855 UT on May 6. It is not clear whether or not the MPEC classified subsatellite was deployed. Launch of STS-40/Columbia is scheduled for early June. Soyuz TM-12 was launched on May 18 and docked with Mir on May 20. The crew are Anatoliy Pavlovich Artsebarskiy (Komandir), Sergey Konstantinovich Krikalyov (Bortinzhener) and Helen Patricia Sharman (Kosmonavt-issledovatel'). Artsebarskiy and Krikalyov are the new Mir main crew, replacing Afanas'ev and Manarov who will return to Earth with Sharman in Soyuz TM-11 on around May 26. Sharman is the first British space traveller and her participation in the mission is part of Project Juno, which is financed by the Moskva Narodniy Bank and has no connection with the British government. The Progress M-7 cargo craft undocked and reentered on May 7. The NOAA 12 weather satellite was launched into polar orbit from Vandenberg by an Atlas E launch vehicle with a Star 37S upper stage on May 14. The NOAA satellites are operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which also operates the network of GOES satellites in geostationary orbit. Six Soviet spacecraft, Kosmos-2143 to Kosmos-2148, were launched on May 16 into a 1400 km orbit by a three stage Tsiklon rocket. They are small store-dump communications satellites, the military version of the Gonets satellites recently offered for commercial use by the NPO-PM company. ___________________________________ |Current STS status: | |Orbiters | | | |OV-102 Columbia LC39B | |OV-103 Discovery OPF Bay 1 | |OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 2 | |OV-105 Endeavour VAB Bay 2 | | | |ML/ET/SRB stacks | | | |ML1/STS-43 VAB Bay 1 | |ML2 | |ML3/STS-40/ET/OV-102 LC39B | ----------------------------------- 10 years ago: 14-22 May 1981. The Soyuz-40 mission carried Soviet cosmonaut Yuriy Romanenko and Rumanian cosmonaut Dumitru Prunariu on a visit to the Salyut-6 space station. 20 years ago: 12-28 May 1971. Three Soviet Mars probes were launched. The first, Kosmos-419, was stranded in low earth orbit by an upper stage failure. Mars-2 and Mars-3 entered Mars orbit in Nov-Dec 1971 and impacted probes on the surface. The surface probes failed to return useful data. 30 years ago: 24 May 1961. The S-45A ionospheric satellite failed to reach orbit when its Juno II booster malfunctioned. (c) 1991 Jonathan McDowell. Information in this report is obtained from public sources and does not reflect the official views of NASA. .-----------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (205)544-7724 | | Space Science Lab ES65 | uucp: | | NASA Marshall Space Flight Center | bitnet : | | Huntsville AL 35812 | inter : mcdowell@xanth.msfc.nasa.gov | | USA | span : ssl::mcdowell | '-----------------------------------------------------------------------------'