Jonathan's Space Report Jul 17 1991 (no.80) ---------------------------------------------------- Atlantis is on the pad. The STS-43 mission will deploy a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS), launch is scheduled for Jul 23. Anatoliy Artsebarksiy and Sergey Krikalyov continue in orbit aboard the Mir/Kvant/Kvant-2/Kristall/Soyuz TM-12/Progress M-8 complex. On Jul 15 they made a third EVA to erect a large structure outside the station. Sergey has just been told that his ride home in November has been cancelled for budgetary reasons and he'll have to stay up till March. Further correction: The Mak satellite was apparently launched on Jun 17. The second Block IIB Navstar navigation satellite was launched on July 4 at 0232 UT. The Delta 7925 launch vehicle also carried an SDIO secondary payload, the LOSAT-X satellite. LOSAT-X was to observe the spectra of rocket plumes as part of the effort to develop ways to observe and target missiles in flight. Anyone who knows what LOSAT stands for, please email me. Two Soyuz launch vehicles flew into orbit on Jul 9 and Jul 10. One carried an advanced recon satellite with a six-month lifetime. The other flew into an 82 degree polar orbit with a Vostok class recoverable satellite, which is probably a Resurs-F remote sensing satellite - but it might be a Kosmos short duration spy satellite. I havent got the name of the satellite yet so I can't tell. A successful Ariane launch on Jul 16 orbited the European Space Agency's ERS-1 Earth Resources Satellite. The satellite, based on the French SPOT imager, carries an active microwave radar imager, altimeters and a radiometer. The Ariane also carried the second ASAP Ariane Structure for Auxiliary Payloads, carrying four microsatellites. One is TUBSAT from the Technische Universitat Berlin, a small scientific data relay satellite. SARA, from the French amateur organization Esie-espace, is an amateur radio-astronomy payload. UoSat 5 (UoSat-OSCAR 22) is Surrey Satellite Technology's payload carrying SateLife's store and forward electronic mail communications for medical organizations in Africa, as well as an experimental wide field CCD camera. Surrey Satellite Technology is a spinoff company from the engineering department of the University of Surrey, Guildford, England (where Ford Prefect wasn't from after all), where Dr. Martin Sweeting led development of earlier UoSats. Orbcomm-X is an Orbital Sciences lightsat to be used by the State of Virginia Center for Innovative Technology for communications experiments (project VaStar). Another Orbital Sciences venture, the second Pegasus launch vehicle, was due for launch today as this edition of JSR closed for press (or whatever the appropriate noun is for what happens to an email publication). ___________________________________ |Current STS status: | |Orbiters | | | |OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 2 | |OV-103 Discovery OPF Bay 1 | |OV-104 Atlantis LC39A | |OV-105 Endeavour VAB Bay 2 | | | |ML/ET/SRB stacks | | | |ML1/STS-43/ET/OV-104 LC39A | |ML2 | |ML3/STS-48 VAB Bay 3 | ----------------------------------- Copyright 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 | | '-----------------------------------------------------------------------------'