Jonathan's Space Report No. 486 2002 Sep 9, Cambridge, MA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shuttle and Station -------------------- The Expedition 5 crew remain aboard the Station. The next mission to Station is the STS-112 flight in early October. Fabrizio Bernardini provided me with some details of the installation during the Aug 26 spacewalk of amateur radio antennas on the Zvezda module as part of the Amateur Radio on International Space Station (ARISS) project. This system has four antenna setups positioned at 90 deg interval around the aft edge of the Zvezda module. Each antenna setup, attached to the module by means of a clamp to some of the EVA handrails, has an L-band/S-band spiral antenna, a vertical flexible whip for VHF/UHF (one of the four is however for HF operations), and a diplexer which enables use of the two antennas with a single coax cable. The four cables are routed via feedthroughs on the aft Zvezda bulkhead and brought behind an internal Zvezda panel which will eventually host the ISS Amateur Radio station equipment (which is now located at the +Y, or Unity end, of Zarya). Next year it will be possible to receive slow scan TV images using a PC with soundcard connected to a basic VHF FM receiver. Recent Launches --------------- Arianespace launched the Ariane 513 vehicle (V155 mission) on Aug 28, placing two satellites in geostationary transfer orbit. Ariane 513 was a standard Ariane 5G; the EPC main stage shut down 9 min after launch, and entered a trans-atmospheric orbit with a perigee probably around 50 km and an apogee probably around 2000 km; it reentered over the Pacific about 45 min after launch. The EPS upper stage fired from T+9 minutes to T+26 min and entered a 585 x 35865 km x 5.4 deg geostationary transfer orbit. Atlantic Bird 1, the upper payload, separated at 2313 UTC. The SYLDA 5C adapter separated at 2316 UTC and the lower payload, MSG 1, separated at 2321 UTC. Atlantic Bird 1 is an Alenia Spazio (Torino) GeoBus (Italsat) class Ku-band communications satellite for Eutelsat, the European communications operator. It will replace Eutelsat II F-2 at 12.5W. The satellite has a dry mass of 1550 kg and carries 1150 kg of propellant for its Astrium 400N liquid apogee engine. MSG 1 is the first of the Meteosat Second Generation satellites, built by Alcatel (Cannes) for Eumetsat, the European weather satellite organization. The MSG satellite is a spin-stabilized cylinder looking much like the old Meteosats (the first of which went up in 1977), but significantly larger. The 3.2m diameter satellite has a dry mass of about 1000 kg and carries about 1010 kg of propellant. It has a pair of Astrium 400N bipropellant thrusters for orbit raising. The SEVIRI imager will take pictures of cloud cover as the satellite spins at 100 revs per minute. MSG 1 also carries an Earth radiation budget experiment (GERB) and the GEOSAR search-and-rescue transponder. An Ariane 44L launch on Sep 6 put the Intelsat 906 satelite in geostationary transfer orbit. Intelsat 906 is a Space Systems Loral FS1300-extended satellite and will provide international communications services over the Indian Ocean. Tracking of the three fragments of the Contour space probe suggests they will return to the Earth around 2003 Aug 16, a year after the apparently fatal motor firing. Fragments A and B will pass well beyond the Earth-Moon system's gravitational sphere of influence, with a closest approach of 5 to 7 million km. Fragment C's orbit is much more uncertain but it seems it will pass much closer to Earth, with the best fit value according to JPL's navigation team of 736000 km, but an uncertainty of over 1.2 million km. The C flyby will occur on 2003 Aug 15 between 0400 and 2300 UTC. The three objects are in an 0.876 x 1.131 AU orbit around the Sun inclined at 8.7 deg to the ecliptic plane and left the 1 million km nominal range of Earth's sphere of influence on Aug 17. Meanwhile, the Delta third stage from the Contour launch is being tracked in a 200 x 106160 km orbit around the Earth; in JSR 483 I mentioned an early orbital dataset which indicated a lower than planned perigee for the launch, but it is now clear that the data was in error (as I speculated at the time) and the Delta rocket performed correctly. Table of Recent Launches ----------------------- Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Jul 3 0647 CONTOUR Delta 7425-9.5 Canaveral SLC17A Space probe 34A Jul 5 2322 Stellat 5 ) Ariane 5G Kourou ELA3 Comms 35A NStar c ) 35B Jul 8 0636 Kosmos-2390 ) Kosmos-3M Plesetsk Comms 36A Kosmos-2391 ) Comms 36B Jul 25 1513 Kosmos-2392 Proton-K/DM5? Baykonur LC81/24 Imaging 37A Aug 21 2205 Hot Bird 6 Atlas V 401 Canaveral SLC41 Comms 38A Aug 22 0515 Echostar VIII Proton-K/DM3 Baykonur LC81/23 Comms 39A Aug 28 2245 Atlantic Bird 1 ) Ariane 5G Kourou ELA3 Comms 40A MSG 1 ) Weather 40B Sep 6 0644 Intelsat 906 Ariane 44L Kourou ELA2 Comms 41A Current Shuttle Processing Status _________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission Launch Due OV-102 Columbia OPF STS-107 2003 Jan 16 Spacehab OV-103 Discovery VAB Maintenance OV-104 Atlantis VAB STS-112 2002 Oct 2 ISS 9A OV-105 Endeavour OPF STS-113 2002 Nov 2 ISS 11A .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | 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 | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'