Jonathan's Space Report Nov 26 1990 (no.60) ---------------------------------------------------- STS-38/Atlantis was launched on Nov 15 and reportedly deployed the AFP-658 recon satellite into a 28 degree inclination orbit. Atlantis landed at the Kennedy Space Center on Nov 20. STS-35/Columbia is due for launch in early December. Crew are Vance Brand, commander; Guy Gardner, pilot; Mike Lounge, Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman, Dr. Robert Parker, mission specialists; Dr. Ron Parise and Dr. Sam Durrance, payload specialists. This will be the last spaceflight by an Apollo astronaut; Brand first flew on the last Apollo mission, the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz flight. The EO-5 (5th long stay) crew, Gennadiy Manakov and Gennadiy Strekalov continue in orbit aboard the Mir/Kvant/Kvant-2/Kristall/Soyuz TM-10/ Progress M-5 complex. Soyuz TM-11 is due for launch on Dec 2, carrying the replacement EO-6 crew, Viktor Afanas'ev of the Soviet Air Force and Musa Manarov of NPO Energiya (the organization that operates the civilian cosmonaut team). The third seat will be filled by passenger Toyohiro Akiyama of the Tokyo Broadcasting System, who will return with the EO-5 crew on board Soyuz TM-7. Kosmos-2103 was launched on Nov 14 by a two-stage version of the Tsiklon from Baykonur, It is a Soviet Naval Intelligence ferret satellite which listens to the electronic emissions from ships; it is in a 400 km circular orbit at 65 degrees to the equator. Kosmos-2104 was launched on Nov 16 by Soyuz from Plesetsk. It is a GRU (Soviet military intelligence) imaging recon satellite. Kosmos-2105 was launched on Nov 20 by Molniya from Plesetsk. It is a PVO (Soviet Air Defence Command) missile early warning satellite in a 600x39300 km x 63 degree orbit. Two US comsats, Satcom C1 and GSTAR 4, were launched by Ariane 42P on Nov 20. Satcom C1 is a C-band (6/4 GHz) cable TV relay satellite operated by GE American Communications (formerly RCA Americom). GSTAR 4 is operated by GTE Spacenet as part of its Ku-band (14/12 GHz) communications network. Both satellites were built by GE Astro Space. --- Hubble Space Telescope update ---- At a workshop at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) on Nov 16, HST observers and STScI staff started to revise the telescope's observing program. The Orbital Verification period is now essentially complete and Science Verification is beginning (lots of calibration observations and test exposures). Proper scheduled observing will begin around July '91. Contrary to initial expectations, it seems to me that programs using the cameras are in better shape than the spectrographs. Because of the aberration, HST can't see extremely faint objects, or moderately faint objects which are right next to rather bright ones (they get lost in the fuzzed out image of the bright one, and if the brightness of your faint object is comparable to the uncertainty in the shape of the point spread function of the bright object, no amount of deconvolution will help you). But it can do very good imaging of groups of bright objects very close to one another, like the R136 cluster, or, with some extra observing time, of a point source on a diffuse background (like the core of NGC 7457). Deconvolution techniques seem to work pretty well; relative to radio astronomy, you have a a much better sampled point spread function, but it varies in shape from one part of the detector to another in nasty ways, so it's not an easy task. FOC seems to be working really well and will get nice UV pictures. The spectrographs, however, have the problem that because of the fuzzed out images, not all the light goes down the spectrograph slit. If you can open up the aperture to let more light in, that's no problem, but that can lose spectral resolution or let in light from a nearby object. If that's a problem for you, you're stuck with integrating for 5 times as long, and the time reallocation committee is going to take a lot of convincing. The Faint Object Spectrograph itself seems to be working fine except for substandard shielding against the Earth's magnetic field, but that shouldn't be too bad for most programs. The telescope's pointing software and the solar array jitter are still giving problems, but in a few months things should improve enough for most purposes. All in all my impression is that while the telescope is not what it might have been, and some of the key projects (particularly the distance scale) are dead in the water until the repair mission, most observer's projects really can still be done without too much loss of science - I'm much more optimistic than I was a month or so ago. ___________________________________ |Current STS status: | |Orbiters | | | |OV-102 Columbia LC39B | |OV-103 Discovery OPF Bay 1 | |OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 2 | | | |ML/ET/SRB stacks | | | |ML1 VAB | |ML2/STS-39 VAB | |ML3/STS-35/ET/OV102 LC39B | ----------------------------------- (c) 1990 Jonathan McDowell