Jonathan's Space Report

Mar 2 1991 (no.66)
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The flight of STS-39/Discovery has been delayed.
Discovery will be rolled back for repairs, while
the STS-37/Atlantis flight (Gamma Ray Observatory
deploy) remains scheduled for early April. The latest
Ariane launch has been delayed till early March.

Viktor Afanas'ev and Musa Manarov continue in orbit aboard the
Mir/Kvant/Kvant-2/Kristall/Soyuz TM-11/Progress M-6 complex.  
They will return in early May, and are to be replaced
by the Soyuz TM-12 crew, Anatoliy Artsebarskiy, Sergey Krikalyov
and Helen Sharman. Ms. Sharman, a British citizen, is flying
an 8 day mission as part of the Juno project financed by the
Moscow National Bank, and will return with the TM-11 crew.

The Salyut-7/Kosmos-1686 space station complex reentered
over Argentina on Feb 7.

The Kosmos-2123 navigation satellite also carries
the RS-12 and RS-13 amateur radio transponder packages.

Kosmos-2124 was launched Feb 7 by Soyuz from Plesetsk;
it is an imaging recon satellite and is expected to
remain in orbit until early April.

Eight small 'lightsats' carrying military communications 
transponders were launched from Feb 12 from Plesetsk on
a single Kosmos R-14 launch vehicle; they were assigned the
names Kosmos-2125 through Kosmos-2132.

A Proton vehicle launched Kosmos-2133, a Soviet geostationary communications
satellite on Feb 14. 

A Soyuz launch vehicle orbited Kosmos-2134, an advanced imaging recon
satellite from Baykonur on Feb 15.

Another navigation satellite, Kosmos-2135, went into orbit
on Feb 26. This is the fourth Kosmos R-14 launch vehicle to be
used in a month; R-14 launches often occur in groups like this.

The 80th Molniya-1 satellite was launched into elliptical
12-hour orbit on Feb 15; it is used for Soviet government
communications.
___________________________________
|Current STS status:              |
|Orbiters                         |
|                                 |
|OV-102 Columbia        OPF Bay 1 |
|OV-103 Discovery       LC39A     |
|OV-104 Atlantis        OPF Bay 2 |
|                                 |
|ML/ET/SRB stacks                 |
|                                 |
|ML1/STS-37/ET          VAB Bay 1 |
|ML2/STS-39/ET/OV-103   LC39A     |
|ML3/STS-40             VAB Bay 3 |
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(c) 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                               |   span : ssl::mcdowell                 |
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