Jonathan's Space Report Oct 12 1990 (no.55) ---------------------------------------------------- Discovery landed on Oct 10 on Runway 22 at Edwards, successfully completing mission STS-41, launched on Oct 6. The ESA Ulysses probe is in solar orbit on its way to Jupiter. The PAM-S final stage, and the second stage of the IUS, as well as associated adapters, also are in solar orbit. STS-38/Atlantis is due for launch around Nov 7, and even Av Leak has not revealed the nature of its DoD payload - yet. Gennadiy Manakov and Gennadiy Strekalov continue in orbit aboard the Mir/Kvant/Kvant-2/Kristall/Soyuz TM-10/Progress M-5 complex. Progress M-5 carries a VBS (Vosvrashchaemaya Ballisticheskaya Kapsula) ballistic recovery capsule which will carry the results of materials processing experiments carried out in the Kristall module back to a landing in Kazakhstan. Progress M-5 used its engine to raise the Mir complex orbit on Oct 1 from 370x406 km to 373x420 km. The Salyut-7/Kosmos-1686 complex continues to decay slowly; its orbit is now 344x346 km high. A Soviet electronic intelligence satellite was destroyed on Oct 4 when the first stage of its Zenit launch vehicle exploded seconds after launch from Kosmodrom Baykonur. This is the first failure of a Zenit to reach orbit, although the upper stage of Kosmos-1714 failed to restart. The satellite would have been Kosmos-2102 had it reached orbit. Kosmos-2101 was launched on Oct 1 into an inital 170x296 km orbit by Soyuz from Baykonur. It is a photographic imaging recon satellite operated by the GRU (Soviet military intelligence). Kosmos-2101 will remain in orbit until about Nov 14; unlike the high-resolution Kosmos-2089, which reentered the same day, it has maneuvered into a relatively high perigee 210x290 km orbit, suggesting that it is a mapping flight. The only other Soviet imaging satellite now in orbit is Kosmos-2072, an advanced digital imaging satellite which was in a 237x277 km orbit on Oct 2. ___________________________________ |Current STS status: | |Orbiters | | | |OV-102 Columbia VAB Bay 1 | |OV-103 Discovery Edwards | |OV-104 Atlantis VAB Bay 3 | | | |ML/ET/SRB stacks | | | |ML3/STS-35/ET/OV102 VAB Bay 1 | |ML1/STS-38/ET/OV104 VAB Bay 3 | |ML2 VAB? | ----------------------------------- (c) 1990 Jonathan McDowell