Jonathan's Space Report No. 169 1993 Sep 23 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Shuttle ------- Discovery retrieved the ORFEUS-SPAS satellite from orbit on Sep 19. Commander Frank Culbertson flew Discovery up to SPAS and mission specialist Dan Bursch used the RMS to grapple it at 1149 UTC. Discovery landed on runway 15 at Kennedy Space Center at 0756:06 (main gear touchdown) on Sep 22, in the first night landing at KSC. The mission duration was 236 hr 11 min, giving Discovery a total flight time of 2629 hr 02 min in 17 flights. This temporarily gives it back the lead in total flight hours from Columbia, which was rolled out to pad 39B on Sep 17. Launch of Columbia's STS-58 flight is scheduled for Oct 14. Mir --- The Expedition 14 crew of Vasiliy Tsibliev and Aleksandr Serebrov continue in orbit aboard the Mir complex. They made two spacewalks in the past week, one of which overlapped with the Discovery EVA. More details next week, I hope. Launches -------- Kosmos-2263, launched into a 848 x 854 km x 71.0 deg orbit, is a heavy signals intelligence satellite. Other satellites in the same series include Kosmos-2219, 2227 and 2237. The program had three consecutive launch failures in 1990-1992, but the last 4 launches have been successful. Zenit has had 21 launches with 5 failures since the first suborbital test flight in 1985. Kosmos-2264, launched into a 402 x 418 km x 65.0 deg orbit, is an electronic intelligence ocean reconnaissance satellite or EORSAT. It carries a low thrust engine to maintain precise separation with other EORSATs and uses radio interferometry to locate transmissions from ships. The Tsiklon-M launch vehicle uses a modified R-36M ICBM (known as SS-9 in the West). The ACTS communications satellite is drifting in the geostationary ring towards its scheduled position of 100 deg West. Date Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Aug 24 1045 Resurs-F1 Soyuz Plesetsk Remote s. 53A Aug 30 1238 Navstar GPS 35 Delta 7925 Canaveral LC17 Navigation 54A Aug 31 0440 Meteor-2 Tsiklon Plesetsk LC32 Weather 55A Aug 31 1520 Temisat - Meteor-2,LEO 55C Sep 3 1117 UHF F2 Atlas I AC-75 Canaveral LC36 Comsat 56A Sep 7 1325 Kosmos-2262 Soyuz Baykonur Recon 57A Sep 12 1145 Discovery Shuttle Kennedy LC39B Spaceship 58A Sep 12 2113 ACTS TOS Discovery, LEO Comsat 58B Sep 13 1506 ORFEUS-SPAS - Discovery, LEO Astronomy 58C Sep 16 0736 Kosmos-2263 Zenit Baykonur LC45 SIGINT 59A Sep 17 0043 Kosmos-2264 Tsiklon-M Baykonur LC90 EORSAT 60A Reentries --------- Aug 5 Kosmos-2260 Landed Aug 18 Molniya-3 (22) Reentered Aug 28 Meteor-Priroda (77-57A) Reentered Sep 10 Resurs-F Landed Sep 22 Discovery Landed at KSC Current Shuttle Processing Status ____________________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission OV-102 Columbia LC39B STS-58 OV-103 Discovery OPF Bay 3 STS-60 OV-104 Atlantis Palmdale OMDP OV-105 Endeavour OPF Bay 1 STS-61 ML/SRB/ET/OV stacks ML1/RSRM-34/ET-57/OV-102 LC39B STS-58 ML2/RSRM-23/ VAB Bay 1 STS-61 ML3/ Refurb .-----------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for | | | Astrophysics | | | 60 Garden St, MS4 | | | Cambridge MA 02138 | inter : jcm@urania.harvard.edu | | USA | | '-----------------------------------------------------------------------------'