Jonathan's Space Report No. 111 1992 Apr 20 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ BOOK REVIEWS: Space Shuttle Almanac, by Joel Powell and Lee Caldwell. 262 pages. $29.95 US [+$10 overseas airmail] from Microgravity Press, 2351 Chicoutimi Dr. NW, Alberta Canada T2L OW2. This is unquestionably the best and most detailed source on the Shuttle available. It's very short on text, and has no pretty color pictures, but is packed with diagrams and information. For each mission up to STS-37, has details of the crew and payloads carried, diagrams of the payloads and of EVA operations, and all the numbers (serial numbers of engines, which robot arm was carried, what time orbital manuevers were carried out, etc, etc.). There are also diagrams of various parts of the orbiter, associated equipment, ground facilities, and maps of the KSC, Edwards, and White Sands landing sites. Finally, the inclusion of all the old launch schedule plans back to 1977 affords an amusing view of the way that the program has slipped. The book shows its somewhat 'home-published' nature in that a number of the diagrams are difficult to read, but I have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone who wants accurate and reliable information. The only mistakes I have found to date are the consistent misspelling of 'principal investigator'; the deploy time of TDRS 1, which is off by one day (p.231); an erroneous timeline for STS 61-B, and a reference to the nonexistent date Feb 29, 1990 (p.134). Cosmonautics 1991, by Y. Semenov et al. Matson Press. 68 pages. $25 US, from Aersopace Ambassadors, PO Box 12603, Huntsville AL 35815. This nicely produced book contains articles written about the Soviet space program by some of its senior members, including NPO Energiya director Semenov and former cosmonaut Ryumin. Notable articles include a review of 1991 activities in the Mir program, a historical overview of the DOS and Almaz (civilian and military Salyut) space station programs, and a brief summary of some of the already released information about the N-1 moon rocket. Unfortunately the book, like its 1990 predecessor, is spoilt by an apparent total lack of proofreading. The translation from Russian is rather poor, and filled with typos - KNES for the French space agency CNES; Timoty Meitss for the UK backup cosmonaut Timothy Mace, MARTA and MANTRA instead of MATRA (a French space firm) and so on. There are also factual errors (e.g. Kosmos-2122 is listed as being launched by a Soyuz launch vehicle, which is incorrect). However, there are some very nice color photos of the Mir station. An interesting contrast to the Powell book - pretty but superficial and unreliable. The Aerospace Ambassadors group is doing a lot of work on cooperation between the US and Russia in space, and I look forward to their forthcoming 'Cosmonautics: The History'. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Space Shuttle mission STS-49, the maiden flight of orbiter Endeavour, is still planned for early May. Another USAF Navstar Global Positioning Satellite was launched at 0320 UTC on 10 Apr. Launch of Navstar 28 was by McDonnell Douglas Delta 7925 from complex 17 at Cape Canaveral. This was the 22nd Delta 2 launch; all have been successful. The Thor first stage flew a suborbital trajectory; the Delta second stage placed the payload and third stage in a low earth orbit inclined 21 degrees, then separated and used up its remaining fuel moving into a 530x715 km orbit (Deltas used to have a habit of blowing up several years after launch and littering low earth orbit with lots of fragments; the fuel depletion burn seems to have cured this problem). The PAM-D Star-48 third stage ignited to put the payload in a 200 x 20400 km transfer orbit inclined 35 degrees to the equator. At apogee, the Navstar's internal Star-37F apogee motor fired to place the payload in a circular 20000 km semi-synchronous (12-hour) orbit at an inclination of 55 degrees; the orbit will be adjusted slightly over the next few weeks. The Block IIA Navstar satellites are built by Rockwell; they contain atomic clocks which are used to provide accurate positioning information for military and civilian uses. The next GPS launch will be Navstar 26 in August. The first Ariane 4 with an upgraded H10-Plus third stage was launched on Apr 15 from the Centre Spatiale Guyanais in Kourou, France at about 2312 UTC. This was an Ariane 44L model; there have now been 22 Ariane 4 launches, with one failure. The payloads were Telecom 2A and Inmarsat II F-4. INMARSAT, the International Maritime Satellite Organization, operates communications satellites used by ships and aircraft. These use the L-band around 1.5 GHz rather than the C (6/4GHz) and Ku (12/11 GHz) used by most communications satellites. Inmarsat started off using satellites leased from other organizations (the Comsat Corp. MARISAT and the ESA MARECS) and transponders on INTELSAT satellites but now has its own INMARSAT II network (INMARSAT I was considered to be the leased network). The satellites are built by a Matra Marconi Space/British Aerospace collaboration and are based on the Eurostar 1000 bus which uses a liquid propellant apogee motor. INMARSAT II satellites Satellite Launch Orbit Inmarsat II F-1 1990 Oct 30 GEO Indian Ocean Inmarsat II F-2 1991 Mar 9 GEO Atlantic Ocean Inmarsat II F-3 1991 Dec 16 GEO Pacific Ocean Inmarsat II F-4 1992 Apr 15 Due over Atlantic The Telecom satellites are owned by France Telecom which operates them in conjuction with the French space agency CNES. Based on Matra Marconi Space's Eurostar 2000 bus which uses a Marquardt R4D liquid apogee motor, the satellites provide 10 C-band transponders for communicatons between mainland France and its overseas parts (departements et territoires d'outremer), 11 Ku-band transponders for business communications links, and 5 X-band transponders for the Syracuse system, a military communications network operated by the DGA (Delegation Generale de l'Armament). France Telecom satellites Satellite Launch Telecom 1A 1984 Aug 4 Telecom 1B 1985 May 8 Telecom 1C 1988 Mar 11 Telecom 2A 1991 Dec 16 Telecom 2B 1992 Apr 15 Telecom 2C 1993? The Synthetic Aperture Radar antenna on the Japanese Fuyo-1 satellite has been successfully deployed. The antenna initially failed to deploy after launch in February. The Kosmos-2107 ocean surveillance satellite reentered on Apr 5. It was launched in Dec 1990 and operated in a 404x418 km orbit at 65 deg inclination until about Mar 10 this year, when its on board engine was used to deboost it to a 226x400 km orbit from which it rapidly decayed. ____________________________________________ |Current STS status: | |Orbiters Location Mission | | | |OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 3 STS-50 | |OV-103 Discovery OPF Bay 2 Mod | |OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 1 STS-46 | |OV-105 Endeavour LC39B STS-49 | | | |ML/SRB/ET/OV stacks | | | |ML1/STS-46 VAB | |ML2/STS-49/ET/OV-105 LC39B | |ML3/STS-50/ET VAB Bay 3 | -------------------------------------------- .-----------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for | | | Astrophysics | | | 60 Garden St, MS4 | | | Cambridge MA 02138 | inter : mcdowell@cfa.harvard.edu | | USA | | '-----------------------------------------------------------------------------'