Jonathan's Space Report No. 316 1997 Mar 27 Cambridge, MA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Editorial --------- Apologies for the delay in this report. I've been very busy at work (for which see the AXAF article below). Shuttle and Mir --------------- After the failure of Progress M-33 to redock with Mir, it was deorbited at 0235 UTC on Mar 12 and reentered at 0323 UTC over the Pacific Ocean. The next Shuttle launch is STS-83, scheduled for launch Apr 3 using OV-102 Columbia. It carries a Spacelab Long Module (probably the CD module, Flight Unit 1, which last flew on STS-73/USML-2 - can anyone confirm this?) and an Extended Duration Orbiter pallet. The Spacelab payload is MSL-1 (Microgravity Science Laboratory 1). This is actually the second payload called MSL-1 to fly on the Shuttle, as the STS-7 OSTA-2 payload was also called MSL-1. An MSL-2 flew on mission 61-C in 1986. The earlier MSL-1 and MSL-2 are nothing to do with the new ones. Crew of STS-83 are James Halsell and Susan Still (Commander and Pilot), Janice Voss (Payload Commander), Mike Gernhardt and Donald Thomas (Mission Specialists), and Roger Crouch and Gregory Linteris (Payload Specialists). Cady Coleman is backup to Thomas, who broke his ankle during training, but it now looks like Thomas will be OK to fly. Crouch is a NASA HQ employee, and was backup on IML-1. Linteris works at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). OV-105 Endeavour returned to Kennedy Space Center on Mar 27 after its refurbishment period at Boeing North American in California. It was scheduled to take up the first Shuttle payload to Space Station on STS-88, but the mission has now been postponed and the manifest is being reworked. AXAF ---- The Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility is NASA's next observatory-class astronomy satellite. It is due for launch in Aug 1998 on Shuttle OV-102 Columbia. A two-stage IUS will place it in a highly elliptical orbit, and an onboard liquid propulsion system will then raise the orbit to 10000 x 140000 km x 28.5 deg. The telescope has a ten meter focal length. Two cameras (ACIS, which contains ten X-ray CCD imagers based on ASCA/SIS technology, and HRC, which has four microchannel plate pairs similar to the ROSAT/HRI but much bigger) will detect the X-rays, and two gratings may be placed in the beam for high resolution spectroscopy. AXAF will make high spatial and spectral resolution observations of X-ray sources such as quasars, clusters of galaxies, supernova remnants, binary and active stars, and even comets. Prime contractor TRW, which is building the spacecraft in California, has completed structural tests of the spacecraft bus and fit checks of the telescope tube. Meanwhile in Alabama, scientists from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, MIT, Penn State, Utrecht and MPE/Garching are calibrating the telescope and its science instruments. In a recent press release we announced that mirror tests show we can focus 70 percent of the X-rays from a point source into an image half an arcsecond across, which is much better than X-ray telescopes now on orbit. This is very exciting news, confirming that we've constructed the mirrors correctly; next we test the mirrors in combination with the flight cameras. The calibration tests began in December and have been running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The telescope is in a two-story-high vacuum chamber at NASA-MSFC, and scientists from here are taking turns going down for a week or two to do 12-hour shifts overseeing the operations and data reduction. Recent Launches --------------- The Tempo 2 direct broadcast satellite was launched by Lockheed Martin's Atlas IIA AC-128 from Cape Canaveral on Mar 8. Tempo is owned by TCI Satellite Entertainment Inc and is a Space Systems/Loral FS-1300 class spacecraft. The Centaur IIA second stage made two burns to place Tempo 2 in a sub-synchronous 369.9 min, 256 x 21125 km x 25.0 deg transfer orbit. It used its own engine to raise orbit to geosynchronous, and on Mar 27 it was on station at 109.9W. Based on info from Ron Pedersen, I understand that that the Intelsat 8 satellites (like Intelsat 801 launched on Mar 1) use the British Royal Ordnance Leros 1 apogee engine. Erratum: Igor Lissov reports that he believes earlier reports that the Zeya satellite is the same as the Mozhaets satellite are incorrect. So I don't know for sure who built Zeya, although NPO-PM is probably still the contractor and the Russian Defense Ministry is the owner. It may be primarily for communications rather than navigation/geodesy. Zeya is in a 424 x 467 km x 97.3 deg orbit. If anyone has any more details on Zeya, please let me know. Table of Recent Launches ------------------------ Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Jan 12 0928 Atlantis Shuttle Kennedy LC39B Spaceship 01A Jan 17 1628 GPS 42 Delta 7925 Canaveral LC17A Navsat FTO Jan 30 2204 GE 2 ) Ariane 44L Kourou ELA2 Comsat 02A Nahuel 1A) Comsat 02B Feb 10 1409 Soyuz TM-25 Soyuz-U Baykonur LC1 Spaceship 03A Feb 11 0855 Discovery STS-82 Shuttle Kennedy LC39A Spaceship 04A Feb 12 0450 Haruka M-V Kagoshima Astronomy 05A Feb 14 0347 Kosmos-2337 Tsiklon-3 Plesetsk LC32/1 Comsat 06A Kosmos-2338 Comsat 06B Kosmos-2339 Comsat 06C Gonets-D1 No. 4 Comsat 06D Gonets-D1 No. 5 Comsat 06E Gonets-D1 No. 6 Comsat 06F Feb 17 0142 JCSAT 4 Atlas IIAS Canaveral LC36B Comsat 07A Feb 23 2020 DSP F18 Titan 4B Canaveral LC40 Early Warn 08A Mar 1 0107 Intelsat 801 Ariane 44P Kourou ELA2 Comsat 09A Mar 4 0200 Zeya Start-1 Svobodniy LC5 Comsat 10A Mar 8 0601 Tempo 2 Atlas IIA Canaveral LC36A Comsat 11A Current Shuttle Processing Status ____________________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission Launch Due OV-102 Columbia LC39A STS-83 Apr 3 OV-103 Discovery OPF Bay 2 STS-85 Jul 17 OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 3 STS-84 May 15 OV-105 Endeavour KSC SLF STS-88 Postponed ML/SRB/ET/OV stacks ML1/ ML2/RSRM-60/ET-85 VAB Bay 3 STS-84 ML3/RSRM-59/ET-84/OV-102 LC39A STS-83 .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | 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 | | Back issues: ftp://sao-ftp.harvard.edu/pub/jcm/space/news/news.* | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'