Jonathan's Space Report No. 445 2001 Jan 29, Cambridge, MA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shuttle and Stations -------------------- Atlantis rolled out to the pad on Jan 26 after further wiring checks. Launch is now scheduled for Feb 7. Revised estimate for the STS-98 cargo bay: (still looking for a payload bay diagram) Est. Mass (kg) Bay 1-2: Orbiter Docking System 1800 and External Airlock 3 EMU spacesuits (S/N unknown) 360? Bay 4-13: Destiny Module 14056 Unknown Adapter Beam with 78? PDGF (Power Data Grapple Fixture) Unknown Adapter Beam with 100? SASA (S-band Antenna Support Assembly) Sill: Canadarm RMS 202 410 ------ Total payload bay cargo 16804 kg Expedition One crew Bill Shepherd, Yuriy Gidzenko and Sergey Krikalyov remain on the ISS, awaiting the launch of STS-98. They will be relieved by the Expedition Two crew which will fly on STS-102 in March. The Mir station had a power failure on Jan 18, delaying the launch of the Progress cargo ship that was to deorbit it for a few days. Progress No. 254, post launch name Progress M1-5, was launched on Jan 24. According to a report by Anatoliy Zak, the Progress carries 2677 kg of fuel. Total launch mass is probably around 7300 kg. A special 3-day fuel-economy approach was be used to keep as much fuel as possibile for the deorbit, scheduled for Mar 6. Progress M1-5 docked with the +X Kvant port at 0533 UTC on Jan 27. Progress M-43 undocked at 0519 UTC on Jan 25 from the same port and on Jan 29 was in a 271 x 280 km x 51.6 deg orbit. On Jan 29, Mir was in a 90.41 min, 284 x 305 km x 51.6 deg orbit. Since Jan 5, when it dipped below its Jan 2000 orbit, it has been lower in average height than at any time since orbit insertion in 1986. In mid-January its perigee dipped below the Nov 1987 record of 286 km. Current Launches ---------------- The Shenzhou spacecraft reportedly carried a monkey, a dog and a rabbit. On Jan 27, Turksat 2A was in a 35768 x 35804 km x 0.1 deg, 1436.10 min geostationary orbit at 41.9 deg E. It entered the geosynchronous region with a burn on Jan 15 around 0800 UTC which raised the period from 1078.3 to 1428.4 min. Errata ------- Stardust's closest appoach distance was 6012 km, not 3706 km as I reported in JSR 444. My mind just can't seem to get around the fact that some people still use imperial units :-) I reported the Japan's LDREX experiment as a failure. J-M. Desobeau correctly pointed out to me that although the LDREX antenna failed to deploy, strictly as an experiment LDREX was a success, although it must have been a very disappointing one for NASDA. The experiment was designed to determine whether the deployment mechanism (planned for the ETS-8 satellite) worked, and it indeed returned lots of information on that subject, which hopefully will lead to a successful ETS-8 mission in the future. (If the video camera or telemetry hadn't functioned, LDREX would have been a failure, but problems with the antenna deployment were what LDREX was designed to measure and don't per se make it a failure). Table of Recent Launches ----------------------- Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Dec 1 0306 Endeavour) Space Shuttle Kennedy LC39 Spaceship 78A ITS P6 ) Station seg. Dec 5 1232 EROS A1 Start-1 Svobodniy Imaging 79A Dec 6 0247 USA 155 Atlas 2AS Canaveral SLC36A Commsat? 80A Dec 20 0026 Astra 2D ) Ariane 5G Kourou ELA3 Commsat 81A GE 8 ) Commsat 81B LDREX ) Tech 81C Dec 20 1620 Beidou CZ-3A Xichang LC2 Navsat 82A Dec 27 1856 Gonets D-1 ) Tsiklon-3 Plesetsk LC32 Commsat F03 Gonets D-1 ) Gonets D-1 ) Strela-3 ) Strela-3 ) Strela-3 ) Jan 9 1700 Shenzhou 2 Chang Zheng 2F Jiuquan Spaceship 01A Jan 10 2209 Turksat 2A Ariane 44P Kourou ELA2 Commsat 02A Jan 24 0428 Progress M1-5 Soyuz-U Baykonur LC1 Cargo 03A Current Shuttle Processing Status _________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission Launch Due OV-102 Columbia Palmdale OMDP OV-103 Discovery OPF Bay 1 STS-102 2001 Mar 8 ISS 5A.1 OV-104 Atlantis LC39A STS-98 2001 Feb 7 ISS 5A OV-105 Endeavour OPF Bay 2 STS-100 2001 Apr 19 ISS 6A .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | 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 | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'