Jonathan's Space Report No 274 1996 Feb 4 Cambridge, MA -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shuttle ------- The next Shuttle mission is STS-75/Columbia, featuring the reflight of the Tethered Satellite System. The cargo includes the TSS-1R Spacelab pallet and deployable TSS satellite with its 20 km tether; the TSS-1R MPESS truss with electrodynamics instrumentation; and two more MPESS cross-bay structures carrying the experiments for the USMP-3 (United States Microgravity Payload) mission. Crew of STS-75 are commander Lt-Col Andrew Allen, USMC/NASA, pilot Lt-Col Dr. Scott Horowitz, USAF/NASA, payload commander Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz, NASA, mission specialists Dr. Jeff Hoffmann, NASA, Claude Nicollier, ESA, and Lt-Col. Maurizio Cheli, Italian Air Force, ESA, and payload specialist Dr. Umberto Guidoni, ASI. (ASI is Agenzia Spaziale Italiano; ESA is European Space Agency; NASA is National Aeronautics and Space Administration.) Allen, Horowitz and Hoffmann are from the US; Chang-Diaz is a naturalized US citizen from Costa Rica; Cheli and Guidoni are Italians and Nicollier is from Switzerland. This mission is extremely unusual in that not only is the main payload flying for a second time, but most of the crew are held over from that TSS-1 (STS-46) mission. Allen, Chang-Diaz, Hoffmann, and Nicollier flew on STS-46 with Loren Shriver, Marsha Ivins and Franco Malerba. Horowitz, Cheli and Guidoni are making their first flights. Recent Launches -------------- A Gorizont broadcasting satellite was launched from Baykonur on Jan 25. It used a Proton-K launch vehicle with a standard Blok-DM2 upper stage. Gorizont satellites provide C and Ku band communications and are built by NPO Prikladnoi Mekhaniki of Krasnoyarsk. Mikhail Reshetnev, founder of NPO-PM and one of the last of the surviving Chief Designers of the early Soviet space program, died on Jan 29. The first Atlas launch of the year came in the early hours of Feb 1. The Indonesian satellite Palapa C-1, a Hughes HS-601 spacecraft, was launched by a Lockheed Martin Atlas IIAS from Cape Canaveral. Centaur AC-126 placed Palapa in a supersynchronous transfer orbit of 240 x 89462 km x 21.9 deg. The apogee will slowly be lowered to synchronous altitude. Indonesia was the first developing country to purchase a domestic satellite communications system; the HS-333 class Palapa A satellites began linking the islands of the Indonesian archipelago in 1976. They were replaced by HS-376 class Palapa B satellites in the 1980s, starting with Palapa B-1 launched on Shuttle mission 7 (Sally Ride's flight) in 1983. The GOES 3 weather satellite arrived at 103W in January. It had been drifting from 180W since early 1995. Locations of recently launched geostationary satellites: Gals No. 2 71.0E Asiasat 2 100.5E Telecom 2C 1.2E Insat 2C 92.4E Galaxy 3R 95.0W Echostar 1 119.2W PAS 3R 42.8W+0.10W/d (Jan 31) Measat 1 91.6E Koreasat 2 117.4E+0.9W/d (Feb 1) Gorizont 40.8E+1.0W/d (Feb 2) Palapa C1 Transfer orbit Table of Recent Launches ------------------------ Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Jan 11 0941 Endeavour Shuttle Kennedy LC39 Spaceship 01A Jan 12 2310 Panamsat 3R ) Ariane 44L Kourou ELA2 Comsat 02A Measat 1 ) Comsat 02B Jan 14 1111 Koreasat 2 Delta 7925 Canaveral LC17B Comsat 03A Jan 14 1132 OAST-Flyer OV105, LEO Science 01B Jan 16 1534? Kosmos-2327 Kosmos-3M Plesetsk Navsat 04A Jan 25 1000? Gorizont Proton-K/DM2 Baykonur Comsat 05A Feb 1 0115 Palapa C-1 Atlas IIAS Canaveral LC36B Comsat 06A Payloads no longer in orbit -------------------------- Dec 7 Galileo Probe Entered Jovian atmosphere Dec 11 Kosmos-398 Reentered over Pacific Dec 18 Kosmos-2305 Deorbited Jan 20 Endeavour Landed at KSC Current Shuttle Processing Status ____________________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission Launch Due OV-102 Columbia LC39B STS-75 Feb 22 OV-103 Discovery Palmdale OMDP OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 1 STS-76 Mar 21 OV-105 Endeavour KSC RW15 STS-72 ML/SRB/ET/OV stacks ML1/ ML2/RSRM-46/ VAB STS-76 ML3/RSRM-53/ET-76/OV-102 LC39B STS-75 .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | 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.* | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'