Jonathan's Space Report No. 263 1995 Nov 9 Cambridge, MA -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shuttle ------- Columbia landed on runway 33 at Kennedy Space Center on Nov 5 at 1145:21 UTC (main gear touchdown) after successfully completing the 15 d 21h 52m US Microgravity Lab 2 (STS-73) mission. Its next mission is STS-75, the Tethered Satellite reflight. OV-102 has now made 18 flights for a total flight time of 4016 hr 34 min, easily more than any of the other Orbiters. Bowersox and Thornton now have more flight time than any active NASA astronauts except Thagard and Dunbar. The next launch is STS-74/Atlantis, scheduled for Nov 11. Atlantis will dock with the Mir space station, delivering the 316GK docking module and supplies. Below I give the cargo bay manifest for Atlantis (my best guess, those in the know please send corrections!). The payload area is divided into 13 bays from forward (airlock) to aft (tail end). '6P' means a payload attached to the port side wall of Bay 6. Side wall payloads usually use either a GAS Beam Adapter (GABA) mounting plate or the smaller APC (Adaptive Payload Carrier) mounting plate. STS-74 Cargo Bay Payloads: - Remote Manipulator System No. 301 Bay 1 Airlock Tunnel Adapter Bay 3 Orbiter Docking System Bay 11 316GK Docking Module Bay 1P APC with ITEPC radiation counter Bay 3S APC with TCS-1 laser rendezvous unit Bay 4S APC with TCS-2 laser rendezvous unit Bay 5S GABA with GLO-4 Hitchhiker experiment and avionics Bay 6P GABA with PASDE canister and Hitchhiker avionics Bay 6S APC with VHF communications system Bay 7S GABA with PASDE canister Bay 13P GABA with PASDE canister Bay 13S APC with IMAX Cargo Bay Camera The GLO-4 experiment measures emission from airglow and Shuttle-atmosphere interactions. PASDE is a collection of three pairs of photgrammetric cameras which will image Mir solar arrays as those arrays wobble in response to station operations; the data will be used to study the structural properties of the arrays. The four GABA payloads are collectively known as the GPP (GLO / PASDE Payload), managed as a Hitchhiker-G payload under the Shuttle Small Payloads Program. The Atlantis crew will remove the Docking Module from the payload bay using the RMS arm, and dock one end of it to the Orbiter Docking System. Then they will rendezvous with the Mir complex and dock the other end with the Kristall module. After the mission, they will undock the ODS from the Docking Module, leaving the Docking Module attached to Kristall where it will accommodate future Shuttle visits. The Docking Module is built by RKK Energia and is a stretched Soyuz orbital module with two APAS-type androgynous docking units. Crew of STS-74 is Ken Cameron, James Halsell, Chris Hadfield, Jerry Ross and William McArthur. Hadfield is a Canadian Space Agency astronaut. Meanwhile, the external tank ET-75 for the STS-72 mission was due to be mated to the RSRM-52 solid rocket motors in the VAB on Nov 9, but the KSC Shuttle Status Reports always forget to tell us what's happening to the other orbiters when a launch is imminent, so I don't know if that event actually happened. Columbia has been towed back to Orbiter Processing Facility Bay 2 and will be prepared for next year's STS-75 mission. Mir ---- The crew of Gidzenko, Avdeev and Reiter continue work aboard the Mir complex. The next major event is the arrival of the Space Shuttle Atlantis with the new Docking Module. Marcia Smith reports that the EVA on Oct 20 probably began at 1150 UT, not 1155 UT as I reported, and thus the duration was 5h 16m. Recent Launches -------------- McDonnell Douglas' Delta 229 was launched from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg AFB on Nov 4, placing the Canadian Space Agency's Radarsat remote sensing spacecraft in orbit. The Delta was a two-stage model 7920-10. RADARSAT's primary payload is a synthetic aperture C-band radar for imaging the Earth's surface. The radar is 15m long and 1.5m wide. The 2750 kg spacecraft was launched into a 783 x 787 km x 98.6 deg polar orbit. Attached to the Delta 229 second stage in orbit is SURFSAT, a small Caltech/JPL package to test deep space communications and orbital VLBI radio astronomy transponders. The Deep Space Network 32 GHz Ka-band transponders will be used to study atmospheric transmission problems at those frequencies and the VLBI Ku and X-band transponders will do tests of the ground system for Japan's VSOP and Russia's proposed Radioastron. The SURFSAT package is part of the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Satellite project, built by Caltech undergraduates. The SURFSAT spacecraft is reported to be working well. After releasing Radarsat, Delta/Surfsat maneuvered into a 934 x 1494 km x 100.6 deg orbit. A Lockheed Martin Titan 4 Centaur was launched on Nov 6 from Cape Canaveral. It placed in orbit the Milstar DFS 2 satellite, which is scheduled to provide secure military communications from geostationary orbit. Titan core vehicle K-21 placed the Centaur TC-13 stage in orbit. Three Centaur burns were used to successively reach low earth parking orbit, geostationary transfer orbit, and geosynchronous orbit. The payload separated and was given the designation USA 115. Thrusters on the Milstar will position the satellite at its geostationary location. The Milstar satellite is built by the part of Lockheed Martin that was formerly Lockheed. It is the second Block 1 Milstar, with a Low Data Rate payload with EHF (44.5 GHz) uplink and SHF (20 GHz) downlink and four UHF AFSATCOM transponders. The satellite also has a 60 GHz crosslink to enable it to communicate with Milstar DFS 1, launched in Feb 1994. The next Milstar will be the first Block 2, with a Medium Data Rate payload of three times higher bit rate. (Payload info from Jane's Space Directory). Table of Recent Launches ------------------------ Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Oct 6 0323 Kosmos-2321 Kosmos-3M Plesetsk LC132 Navsat 52A Oct 8 1851 Progress M-29 Soyuz-U Baykonur LC1 Cargo 53A Oct 11 1626 Luch-1 Proton-K/DM2M Baykonur Data Relay 54A Oct 19 0038 Astra 1E Ariane 42L Kourou ELA2 Comsat 55A Oct 20 1353 Columbia ) Shuttle Kennedy LC39B Spaceship 56A Spacelab USML-2) Oct 22 0800 UHF F6 Atlas II Canaveral LC36 Comsat 57A Oct 23 2203 Meteor Conestoga 1620 Wallops LA0 Micrograv FTO Oct 31 2019 Kosmos-2322 Zenit-2 Baykonur LC45L Sigint 58A Nov 4 1422 Radarsat ) Delta 7920 Vandenberg SLC2 Rem sensing 59A SURFSAT ) 59B Nov 6 0515 Milstar DFS 2 Titan 4 Centaur Canaveral LC40 Comsat 60A Reentries --------- Oct 26 Resurs-F2 Landed Nov 5 Columbia Landed at KSC Current Shuttle Processing Status ____________________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission Launch Due OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 2 STS-75 Feb 29 OV-103 Discovery Palmdale OMDP OV-104 Atlantis LC39A STS-74 Nov 11 OV-105 Endeavour OPF Bay 3 STS-72 Jan 11 ML/SRB/ET/OV stacks ML1/RSRM-52 VAB STS-72 ML2/RSRM-51/ET-74/OV-104 LC39A STS-74 ML3/ .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for | | | Astrophysics | | | 60 Garden St, MS6 | | | Cambridge MA 02138 | inter : jcm@urania.harvard.edu | | USA | jmcdowell@cfa.harvard.edu | | | | JSR: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/QEDT/jcm/space/jsr/jsr.html | | ftp://sao-ftp.harvard.edu/pub/jcm/space/news/news.* | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'