Jonathan's Space Report No. 458 2001 Aug 6 Cambridge, MA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shuttle and Station -------------------- The next Shuttle flight is STS-105, scheduled for Aug 9. The cargo bay contains the Integrated Cargo Carrier platform and the Leonardo module, and a set of canisters on the sidewall. The ICC will carry the Early Ammonia Servicer for the P6 truss, and two small exposure experiments PEC-1 and PEC-2 under the MISSE materials exposure program, which will be installed on Quest. The Leonardo module contains Express Racks 4 and 5, as well as resupply stowage racks. HEAT is a Hitchhiker payload comprising Simplesat, AMTEC and SEM-10, on two adapter beams on the port and starboard sides of bay 13. The 13P beam carries AMTEC in the forward position and SEM-10 in the aft position. AMTEC, the Alkali Metal Thermal-to-Electric Converter, is a JPL technology experiment. SEM-10 is a canister with 11 high school experiments and AMTEC's avionics. The 13S beam carries the Simplesat can forward and the ACE avionics plate aft. The octagonal cylinder Simplesat will be ejected from one canister and will test out GPS attitude control. Another adapter beam, somewhere else in the payload bay (please email me if you know where) carries two more canisters. G-780 is a Mayo High School (Rochester, Minnesota) experiment to study germination of faba beans. G-774 is the Microgravity Smoldering Combustion (MSC) experiment. Recent Launches --------------- MAP flew past the Moon on Jul 30 at 1639 UTC at a distance of 5200 km above the lunar surface. Galileo passed Io at a distance of 200 km at 0459 UTC on Aug 6. Closest approach to Jupiter on this orbit was an altitude of 350000 km at 0452 UTC on Aug 6. The satellite launched on Jul 20 was given the name Molniya-3 after reaching orbit. It is a Molniya-3K satellite, and not a Molniya-1K satellite as erroneously reported earlier. A Peackeeper missile was launched from Vandenberg on flight test 30PA on Jul 27 at around 0801 UTC, but was destroyed during flight and did not reach its planned 1000 km apogee. Russia's first scientific satellite in several years was launched on Jul 31. A Yuzhnoe Tsiklon-3 vehicle took off from Plesetsk at 0800 UTC and reached transfer orbit at 0807 UTC. The S5M second stage restarted at 0850 UTC and separated a minute later delivering Koronas-F to a 486 x 529 km x 82.5 deg orbit. Koronas-F, an AUOS-SM type solar-pointing satellite built by Yuzhnoe in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, carries a set of solar physics instruments. There were 11 launches of earth-oriented AUOS-Z satellites between 1976 and 1991, followed by development of the two solar-pointing AUOS-SM satellites AUOS-SM-KI (Koronas-I) and AUOS-SM-KF (Koronas-F), whose names reflect the two research insitutes who were the original principal investigators for the experiment payloads. The I satellite, for the IZMIRAN geophysics institute, was launched in 1994 and reentered earlier this year. The new F satellite carries that designation because the original lead organization was the Lebedev institute known as FIAN in Russian, although it also carries experiments from IZMIRAN and other research centers. A new Defense Support Program infrared missile early warning satellite was launched on Aug 6. The Lockheed Martin Titan 4B took off from Cape Canaveral into a 328 x 663 km x 28.7 deg parking orbit. The Boeing IUS-16 upper stage then fired its first solid motor to enter geostationary transfer orbit. The second IUS solid motor fired at around 1400 UTC placing DSP Flight 21 in near-geosynchronous orbit. The DSP satellites are built by TRW and have a mass of about 2300 kg. Table of Recent Launches ----------------------- Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Jul 12 0904 Atlantis STS-104) Shuttle Kennedy LC39B Spaceship 28A Quest ) Station module Jul 12 2158 Artemis ) Ariane 5G Kourou ELA3 Expt. comms 29A BSAT-2b ) Ku video 29B Jul 20 0017 Molniya-3 Molniya-M Plesetsk LC43/4 Comms 30A Jul 23 0723 GOES 12 Atlas IIA Canaveral SLC36A Weather 31A Jul 31 0800 Koronas-F Tsiklon-3 Plesetsk LC32 Astronomy 32A Aug 6 0728 DSP 21 Titan 4B/IUS Canaveral SLC40 Early Warn 33A Current Shuttle Processing Status _________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission Launch Due OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 3 STS-109 2002 Jan 17 HST SM-3B OV-103 Discovery LC39A STS-105 2001 Aug 9 ISS 7A.1 OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 2 STS-110 2002 Feb 28 ISS 8A OV-105 Endeavour OPF Bay 1 STS-108 2001 Nov 29 ISS UF-1 .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | 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 | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'