Jonathan's Space Report No. 485 2002 Aug 27, Cambridge, MA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shuttle and Station -------------------- The Expedition 5 crew remain aboard the Station. On Aug 16 Valeriy Korzun and Peggy Whitson carried out two depressurized operations in spacesuits Orlan-M No. 14 and Orlan-M No. 23. The first operation began at 0730 UTC (by my criterion of pressure reaching the 50 mbar mark) and concluded at 0753 UTC for a duration of 23 minutes. In this depress op, Korzun and Whitson remained inside the Pirs airlock. The actual EVA was postponed at the last moment because of a misconfigured oxygen valve in their spacesuits, forcing the astronauts to repressurize Pirs to 730 mbar to correct the problem. The second operation began at 0906 when the pressure in Pirs again fell below 50 mbar and the hatch was opened shortly afterwards. This time all went well as the astronauts emerged from Pirs and attached six debris protection shields to the outside of the the Zvezda module. Korzun and Whitson returned to Pirs, postponing some planned tasks, and closed the hatch at 1348 UTC. Pirs was repressurized at 1352 UTC for a depress duration of 4h46min. Another spacewalk was carried out on Aug 26 by Korzun and Treshchev in Orlan-M suits nos. 14 and 12. Depressurization of the Pirs airlock past the 50 mbar point was at 0507 UTC, with hatch open at 0527. They installed a storage locker on Zarya, changed out some sample trays for exposure experiments, and mounted two amateur radio antennas on the station. The hatch was closed at 1048 UTC and the Pirs was repressurized at about 1050 UTC for a duration (depress to repress) of 5hr 43min. Kudos to Eddie Lyons for helping me with some of the times again; some are a bit approximate because NASA PAO has a habit of talking over the most critical moments of the space-ground communications. Three debris objects were cataloged by Space Command after the Aug 26 spacewalk; two of them may be decontamination towels jettisoned by the astronauts at about 1019 UTC. Meanwhile, the Shuttle launch schedule has been revised as the Orbiter hydrogen flow liners undergo welding repairs. Forthcoming Station launches: Mission Launch estimate Spacecraft Payload 9P/M1-9 2002 Sep 20 Progress M1 No. 258 9A/STS-112 2002 Oct 2 Atlantis S1 5S/TMA-1 2002 Oct 28 Soyuz TMA No. 211 11A/STS-113 2002 Nov ? Endeavour P1 10P/M-47 2002 Jan 30 Progress M No. 247 Recent Launches --------------- The Contour probe fired its ATK/Thiokol Star 30BP solid motor at 0849 UTC on Aug 15. The burn was meant to insert the probe into solar orbit. No signals have been received from the probe since the motor firing, and the Spacewatch telescopes imaged three objects along the trajectory, so it looks like Contour has broken up. The Thiokol Star 30 motor has been launched 90 times and fired 86 times (4 no tests due to launch failures); the 30BP model has had 28 flights. This is a very sad loss for solar system exploration. The first Lockheed Martin Astronautics Atlas V was successfully launched on Aug 21. The Atlas V is a new family of launch vehicles merging the Atlas and Titan lines, using the Atlas CCB (Common Core Booster) first stage. The CCB is a 3.80-meter diameter, 32-m long stage, much larger than and quite different from the 3.05-meter diameter, 21 to 29-m long Atlas stage used from 1957 to the present on other Atlas vehicles. The old Atlas stage used a thin tank wall and needed to be kept pressurized by gas or propellant inside or it would crumple (there is a great video of a mid-1960's pad accident where the Atlas stage folds in half). The new stage, like the Titan core which it also replaces, uses a standard structurally stable tank. It does have components in common with recent Atlas vehicles, and the distinctive external avionics pod near the base gives the stage some visual commonality with the old Atlas. The CCB diameter is the same as the Ariane 1-4 vehicle and marginally smaller than the Zenit. CCB uses the Russian RD-180 LOX/kerosene engine. The Atlas V 401 model uses a CCB first stage with a single-engine Centaur (Centaur SEC). The stage on orbit is a cylinder about 11.7m long, 3.1m diameter and has a mass of around 2020 kg when residual fuels are depleted. This Centaur version uses an RL-10A-4-2 liquid hydrogen fuelled engine. Atlas V flight AV-001 placed the Hot Bird 6 satellite in geostationary transfer orbit. Hot Bird 6 was built by Alcatel (Cannes) for Eutelsat and will provide IP, digital TV and radio to Europe, N Africa and the Middle East. The satellite has 28 Ku-band and 4 Ka-band transponders; it is an Alcatel Spacebus 3000B3 class satellite with a launch mass of 3905 kg. Another communications satellite, Echostar VIII, was launched on Aug 22 by a Krunichev Proton-K with an Energiya DM3 upper stage. The Proton third stage placed the heavy payload on a suborbital trajectory and the DM3 make the parking orbit insertion burn, followed by two more burns to deliver Echostar to its intermediate transfer orbit. Echostar VIII, owned by Echostar Communications Corp., is a Loral SS-L/1300 class satellite with a launch mass of 4660 kg - comparable to the similar Intelsat 9 but larger than other previous SS-L/1300 satellites. Note that only the payload and the DM3 stage reached orbit. According to Space Command data, Kosmos-2392 (see JSR 484) launched to a roughly 190 x 190 km x 64.9 deg parking orbit; the Proton third stage (2002-37B) and DM adapter (2002-37C) rapidly decayed from this orbit. The first DM burn put the vehicle in a 199 x 2889 km x 63.8 deg transfer orbit; the two SOZ ullage motors (2002-37E and 37F) were left in this orbit. The second DM burn put Kosmos-2392 (2002-37A) and the DM stage itself (2002-37D) in a 1512 x 1840 km x 63.46 deg orbit. Boeing is slowly moving the TDRS-I spacecraft towards geostationary orbit. TDRS-I has a malfunctioning propulsion system; it was launched on Mar 8. Burns on Jun 12, Jun 16 and Jul 13 have raised the orbit to 11286 x 35824 km x 15.7 deg, and another burn since then put TDRS-I in a 13324 x 35815 km x 14.8 deg orbit. Meanwhile, ESA's Artemis is now at 33188 x 33310 km x 1.3 deg, using its ion engines to climb slowly to geostationary altitude. Japan's National Aerospace Lab (NAL) launched a small NAL-735 rocket booster with a model supersonic airplane from Woomera on Jul 14; the rocket exploded shortly after launch. I wouldn't normally report such a small rocket launch, which wasn't even planned to leave the atmosphere, but Aviation Week (Aug 12, p 29) is reporting that it was a Mu-3S2 rocket. This is entirely incorrect - the NAL-735 rocket is much smaller; it is derived from the SB-735 which is used as a strap-on booster on the Mu-3S2, but it is much smaller than the Mu-3S2 itself: NAL-735 is about 5m long, 0.74m dia, and perhaps 5-7 tonne, compared with 28m long, 1.4m dia and 62 tonne for the Mu-3S2. I belabor this now because I know from experience that this error will propagate into lots of reference works. Table of Recent Launches ----------------------- Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Jun 5 0644 Intelsat 905 Ariane 44L Kourou ELA2 Comms. 27A Jun 5 2122 Endeavour ) Shuttle Kennedy LC39A Spaceship 28A Leonardo ) Jun 10 0114 Ekspress A1R Proton-K/DM2M? Baykonur Comms 29A Jun 15 2239 Galaxy 3C Zenit-3SL Odyssey, POR Comms 30A Jun 20 0933 Iridium SV97 ) Rokot/Briz-KM Plesetsk Comms 31A Iridium SV98 ) Comms 31B Jun 24 1823 NOAA 17 Titan 23G Vandenberg SLC4W Weather 32A Jun 26 0536 Progress M-46 Soyuz-U Baykonur LC1/5 Cargo 33A 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 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 OPF STS-112 2002 Oct 2 ISS 9A OV-105 Endeavour OPF STS-113 2002 Nov 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 | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'