Jonathan's Space Report No. 300 1996 Oct 1 Cambridge, MA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: I have (finally!) updated the geostationary satellite list at http://hea-www.harvard.edu/QEDT/jcm/space/jsr/geo.log. Shuttle and Mir --------------- Atlantis undocked from the Mir complex on Sep 23 at 2333 UTC. Valeriy Korzun, Aleksandr Kaleri and John Blaha remain on Mir. On Sep 26 Atlantis closed its payload bay doors, and at 1106 UTC fired its OMS engines for a three minute long deorbit burn. After entry interface at 1142 UTC the spaceship flew across Canada and the US for a landing at the Kennedy Space Center's Runway 15 at 1213 UTC, completing Shannon Lucid's record breaking 188 day 4 hr 0 min flight. Atlantis is now being prepared for its next mission, STS-81. Unexpected erosion was found in the nozzle of 360T056B, STS-79's right hand SRB, but it is not clear what effect this will have on the next launch scheduled for Nov 8. Mission STS-80 will deploy and retrieve the Orfeus astronomy satellite and the Wake Shield Facility materials processing satellite. Mission specialists Tammy Jernigan and Thomas Jones will carry out another EDFT spacewalk to test equipment for Space Station. As well as commander Kenneth Cockrell and pilot Kent Rominger, the mission will carry veteran Story Musgrave who will become the second person after John Young to make six space flights. On STS-6, Musgrave carried out the first Shuttle spacewalk. On Mission 51-F, he carried out experiments on the Spacelab 2 mission, which included an `abort to orbit' during launch when an engine shut down. On Missions STS-33 and STS-44 Musgrave helped deploy military satellites, and on Mission STS-61 he made more spacewalks to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Musgrave is 61 years old and will become the oldest space traveller ever, beating the record set by 59-year-old Vance Brand in 1990. Dr. Musgrave has been a NASA astronaut since 1967. He has a B.S. in mathematics, a B.A. in chemistry, an MBA in operations analysis and computer programming, an M.Sc. in physiology, an M.A. in literature, and an M.D.. He is also a private pilot with 17000 hours of flight time, and until 1989 combined his job as a NASA astronaut in Houston with moonlighting as a surgeon at Denver General Hospital and a professor of physiology at the University of Kentucky. Can you spell `overachiever', kids? Recent Launches --------------- Another successful Proton launch placed the second Ekspress comsat in geosynchronous orbit. Ekspress replaces Gorizont as the Russian domestic television satellite system. This satellite is probably designated Ekspress No. 12 (Russian comsat builder Prikladnoi Mekhaniki usually starts numbering its satellite series at 11 for reasons which escape me). The Proton rocket is built by Krunichev, with a Blok-DM2 upper stage designed by RKK Energiya. Other Proton launches so far this year include two Gorizont communications satellites, a Raduga comsat for the Russian government, the Spektr space station module, and the commercial launches of Astra 1F and Inmarsat III F2. Inmarsat has confirmed that the Inmarsat III F2 satellite did not carry an apogee motor. The Blok-DM upper stage delivered F2 to geosynchronous orbit and separated 7 hours after launch. The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization's MSX satellite released an emissive reference sphere on Sep 12, its second subsatellite release. The small spheres have not been cataloged by Space Command. Obituary - IUE -------------- The International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) was shut down at 1842 UT on 1996 Sep 30. Prior to the final orbit raising burn, IUE was in a 1437 min, 29992 x 41616 km orbit inclined 35.9 deg. (GSFC has not yet released post-shutdown elements). IUE was probably the most successful scientific satellite ever. IUE was launched in January 1978 by Delta from Cape Canaveral. The spacecraft was a joint project between NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the European Space Agency, and the UK Science Research Council. It was controlled from both Goddard and Villafranca near Madrid. The satellite carried a small telescope and four spectrographs (two prime and two backup) which obtained ultraviolet spectra of astronomical objects. Exceeding its nominal six month mission duration by almost a factor of 40, IUE remained an essential scientific tool right into the 1990s. Even the success of the HST repair mission did not remove the need for IUE, because there are many projects, such as monitoring time variability of bright sources, for which you need a small telescope for a long time instead of a large telescope for a short time (and you can't get HST for a long time!). IUE results have affected every field of astronomy, and in particular much of our current understanding of hot stars in this galaxy and of the inner regions of quasars is due to work with IUE. IUE was the first common user astronomy satellite, where any astronomer with a good idea could apply for observing time. Because its synchronous orbit allowed real time commanding, it remains the only satellite which astronomers were able to use like a ground based telescope, going to the control center and making decisions on the fly - for instance, whether to change the length of the next exposure if the previous one was over or under exposed. Since many ultraviolet stars and quasars vary in brightness, so you don't know how bright they will be on the day you observe, this is really useful - as I can testify from personal experience as an IUE observer. You can't do that with a low orbit satellite like HST where observations must be scheduled weeks in advance. (Besides, having real time authority over a geosynchronous orbit spacecraft is probably the closest I'll ever get to sitting in Captain Picard's chair :-)). IUE was a pleasure to use, and during the 1980s was crucial to the research of many astronomers including myself. IUE will be missed. Table of Recent Launches ------------------------ Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Aug 8 2249 Italsat F2 ) Ariane 44L Kourou ELA2 Comsat 44A Telecom 2D ) Comsat 44B Aug 14 2221 Molniya-1T Molniya-M Plesetsk Comsat 45A Aug 17 0153 ADEOS ) H-II Tanegashima Y Rem.sens. 46A JAS-2 ) Comsat 46B Aug 17 1318 Soyuz TM-24 Soyuz-U Baykonur LC1? Spaceship 47A Aug 18 1027 Zhongxing 7 Chang Zheng 3 Xichang Comsat 48A Aug 21 0947 FAST Pegasus XL Vandenberg Auroral 49A Aug 29 0522 Interbol-2 ) Molniya-M Plesetsk LC43 Auroral 50B Magion 5 ) 50C Microsat ) 50A Sep 4 0901 Kosmos-2333 Zenit-2 Baykonur LC45L Sigint 51A Sep 5 1347 Kosmos-2334 ) Kosmos-3M Plesetsk LC132/1 Navsat 52A UNAMSat ) 52B Sep 6 1737 Inmarsat III F2 Proton Baykonur LC81 Comsat 53A Sep 8 2149 GE-1 Atlas IIA Canaveral LC36B Comsat 54A Sep 11 0000 Echostar II Ariane 42P Kourou ELA2 Comsat 55A Sep 12 0849 Navstar 30 Delta 7925 Canaveral LC17A Navsat 56A Sep 16 0855 Atlantis Shuttle Kennedy LC39A Spaceship 57A Sep 26 1751 Ekspress Proton-K Baykonur Comsat 58A Current Shuttle Processing Status ____________________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission Launch Due OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 1 STS-80 Nov 8 OV-103 Discovery OPF Bay 2 STS-82 Feb 13 OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 3 STS-81 Jan 12 OV-105 Endeavour Palmdale OMDP ML/SRB/ET/OV stacks ML1/ ML2/RSRM-54 VAB Bay 1 STS-81 ML3/RSRM-49/ET-80 VAB Bay 3 STS-80 .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | 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 | | Back issues: ftp://sao-ftp.harvard.edu/pub/jcm/space/news/news.* | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'