Jonathan's Space Report No. 180 1994 Jan 17 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Shuttle ------- The STS-60 stack with orbiter OV-103 Discovery was moved to pad 39A on Jan 10. Launch is due for Feb 3. Payloads are the Wake Shield Facility free flyer satellite, the Spacehab 2 commercial lab module, and a GAS Bridge Assembly (GBA) carrying Getaway Special canisters. These include cans containing the ODERACS and BREMSAT microsatellites. ODERACS was carried into space in 1992 but its ejection mechanism failed; it consists of six small spheres which will be used to calibrate space debris tracking systems. The crew of STS-60 includes five NASA astronauts and one Russian astronaut. Commander: Charles Bolden (three flights already, including pilot of HST deployment and commander of ATLAS-1 Spacelab mission.) Pilot: Kenneth Reightler (first flight) Mission Specialists: Franklin Chang-Diaz (three flights to date), Jan Davis (one flight), and Ron Sega (rookie). Payload Specialist: Sergey Krikalyov, engineer-cosmonaut of NPO Energiya, the "last Soviet citizen" who was aboard Mir during the fall of the USSR. Meanwhile, crew members have been assigned to the STS-66 and STS-67 missions scheduled later this year. Donald McMonagle will command STS-66, the first astronaut of the 1987 group to get a command. Stephen Oswald will command the STS-67 Astro-2 mission. The assignments of Curtis Brown as STS-66 pilot and William Gregory as pilot on STS-67 means that all of the 1990 group now have flight slots and all of the 1987 group now have assignments to their second flight. Mir --- Soyuz TM-18 was launched at 1005 UTC on Jan 8 and docked at the Kvant module on Jan 10 at 1115. The EO-14 crew landed at 0818 UTC on Jan 14 in the Soyuz TM-17 spaceship. The EO-14 expedition lasted 196 days 18hr 45 m, the 7th longest spaceflight. Aleksandr Serebrov has now spent over a year in space on 4 flights; he is one of 8 people to have accumulated more than a year of spaceflight time. Vladimir Polyakov is now the Mir resident physician, and is on his second flight to Mir. He will pass the cumulative one year mark on April 12 (the 33rd anniversary of Gagarin's flight). Romanenko's 1987 record will be beaten on Jul 17, Krikalyov's 1992 cumulative duration will be passed on Aug 18, and the all time cumulative record of Musa Manarov (541 days, set in 1991) will be passed on Nov 4. The current record for a single flight set by Manarov and Titov in 1988 will be passed on Jan 9 next year. The other two members of the EO-15 crew, Viktor Afanas'ev and Yuriy Usachyov, are schedule to land in early July and will be replaced by cosmonauts Malenchenko and Musabaev, neither of whom has flown before. Launches -------- A Molniya-1T communications satellite was launched on Dec 22 from Plesetsk. The Molniya-1 class satellites are built by NPO Prikladnoi Mekhaniki of Krasnoyarsk, and are used for Russian government and military communications. The 8K78M Molniya launch vehicle places the payload and fourth stage in a low parking orbit; after a partial orbit, the fourth stage ignites to place the payload in a highly elliptical orbit with a 12 hour period. An on-board engine on the satellite is used for precise maintenance of the orbital period. Date Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Dec 2 0927 Endeavour Shuttle Kennedy LC39 Spaceship 75A Dec 8 0048 NATO IVB Delta 7925 Canaveral LC17 Comsat 76A Dec 16 0040 Telstar 401 Atlas Centaur Canaveral LC36 Comsat 77A Dec 18 0127 DBS 1 ) Ariane Kourou ELA2 Comsat 78A Thaicom 1 ) 78B Dec 22 Molniya-1T Molniya Plesetsk Comsat 79A Jan 8 1005 Soyuz TM-18 Soyuz Baykonur Spaceship 01A Reentries --------- Dec 16 Kosmos-2223 Deorbited Dec 18 Kosmos-2262 Landed Jan 14 Soyuz TM-17 Landed Current Shuttle Processing Status ____________________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 2 STS-62 OV-103 Discovery LC39A STS-60 OV-104 Atlantis Palmdale OMDP OV-105 Endeavour OPF Bay 1 STS-59 ML/SRB/ET/OV stacks ML1/RSRM-36? VAB Bay 1 STS-62 ML2/ ML3/RSRM-35?/ET-61/OV-103 LC39A STS-60 .-----------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for | | | Astrophysics | | | 60 Garden St, MS4 | | | Cambridge MA 02138 | inter : jcm@urania.harvard.edu | | USA | | '-----------------------------------------------------------------------------' ,