Jonathan’s Space Report No. 449 2001 Mar 23

Mir reentry

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On Mar 19 Mir was in a 224 x 230 km x 51.6 deg orbit. On Mar 23 at 0033
UTC Progress M1-5 carried out the first small DPO burn to lower Mir’s
orbit from 212 x 218 km to 190 x 219 km. A second small burn began at
0201 UTC and put Mir in a 150 x 215 km orbit. The main deorbit burn
began at 0507 UTC, lowering perigee to less than 80 km. At 0550 UTC
observers in Fiji reported seeing multiple bright reentry bodies passing
overhead, confirming that the station had broken up by that time. The
impact zone is around 160W 40S.

DOS 7 (Long-duration Orbital Station 7), named Mir after launch in Feb
1986, was the 10th Soviet space station to leave the pad. It was visited
by 111 spacecraft. Astronauts occupied it for 4591 days and made 79
spacewalks from it. The longest continuous occupation (neglecting brief
absences during Soyuz redockings where the crew remained within a few
hundred meters of the station) was 11 days short of a decade. The
duration record of 437 days for a single flight was set by Valeriy
Polyakov onboard Mir in 1994-1995.

The components of Mir at the time of reentry were:

  Designations         Name            Launch date

 DOS 7  17KS No 127-1  “Mir”           Feb 1986

 TsM-E  37KE No 010    “Kvant”         Mar 1987

 TsM-D  77KS No 171-1  “Kvant-2”       Nov 1989

 TsM-T  77KS No 172-1  “Kristall”      May 1990

 TsM-O  77KS No 173-1  “Spektr”        May 1995

 SO     316GK No. 1     Stikovochniy Otsek  Nov 1995

 TsM-I  77KS No 174-1  “Priroda”       Apr 1996

        7K-TGM No. 254 “Progress M1-5” Jan 2001

Shuttle and Stations

——————–

Discovery was launched on mission STS-102 (Space Station flight 5A.1)
on Mar 8 at 1142:09 UTC. At 1150 UTC the main engines cut off and
the external tank separated; orbiter and external tank were
at this point in a 60 x 222 km x 51.6 deg orbit. The orbiter
fired its OMS engines at 1221 UTC to raise the orbit to 185 x 219 km,
while ET-107 fell back towards the Pacific. Launch mass of
Discovery was probably around 114000 kg; the value in the NASA
press kit is clearly incorrect.

Discovery docked with the PMA-2 port on the Station at 0639 UTC on Mar
10. According to the spaceflightnow.com story by Bill Harwood, Usachyov
became a member of the ISS crew at 1034 UTC.

On Mar 11 Jim Voss and Susan Helms made a spacewalk from Discovery’s
airlock. A PAD device used to attach equipment to the RMS arm floated
free and Voss retrieved a spare one from Unity, putting the walk behind
schedule. The PAD has been cataloged by Space Command as satellite 26723,
international designation 2001-010B.
The astronauts installed the Lab Cradle Assembly and the Rigid
Umbilical on Destiny and disconnected the umbilicals connecting the
PMA-3 docking port to Unity. The astronauts then spent two-and-a-half
hours back in the depressurized airlock in case their help was needed
during the move of PMA-3. Thomas used the RMS arm to unberth PMA-3 from
the nadir port on Unity and relocated it to the port port location,
freeing up the nadir for the MPLM. The airlock was depressurized at 0508
UTC and repressurized at 1408 UTC. Duration was 9h00m (depress/repress),
about 6h16m (ingress/egress), 8h54m (hatch open/close), and 8h56m (NASA
rule).

The Leonardo module was unberthed from the payload bay at 0410 UTC
on Mar 12 and berthed at Unity’s nadir port at 0606 UTC.

Mar 13 saw the second spacewalk, by Andy Thomas and Paul Richards. The
airlock was depressurized at 0518 UTC and the hatch opened at 0520 UTC.
The astronauts took the External Stowage Platform from the ICC carrier
to the port side of the Destiny module, and then installed the spare
Pump Flow Control System on it. The ESP is used to store on-orbit-spare
equipment. Next they hooked up cables on the robot arm’s umbilical, and
travelled up to the top of the P6 tower to fix a solar array latch – it
just needed a good thump – and inspect the FPP experiment. The
astronauts returned to the airlock at 1132 UTC and began repressurizing
at 1144 UTC. Duration was 6h26m (depress/repress), 5h58m (egress/ingress),
6h 13m (hatch open/close), or 6h21m (NASA rules).

A minute into airlock repressurization, Shannon Lucid in Houston
called up to tell the crew to halt the repress. At 1149 the
airlock began depressurizing again and at 1155 it was again at
zero. A detailed test objective, DTO 257, was testing the effects
of firing Shuttle RCS jets while docked to the ISS, and controllers
wanted data with the airlock at vacuum, since that changes the dynamics.
The airlock was finally repressurized again at 1209 UTC.
Since the initial repressurization brought the airlock up to
120 mbar (1.8 psi) and I arbitrarily set 100 mbar as my boundary
for delimiting a ‘depressurized operation’, I count the
20-minute period from 1150 to 1209 as a separate depress op.
NASA did not count the new depressurization as an EVA. The hatch
remained closed and the astronauts remained inside the airlock.

Leonardo was removed from Unity at 1042 UTC on Mar 1 and reberthed
around 1204 UTC. At 0232 UTC on Mar 19 command of ISS was transferred
to Expedition 2 and the hatches were closed. Discovery undocked
at 0432 UTC and flew once around the station before departing at 0548 UTC.
ISS mass after undocking was 115527 kg.
The OMS engines fired for the deorbit burn at 0625 UTC on Mar 21,
and Discovery touched down on runway 15 at Kennedy Space Center
at 0731 UTC.

Recent Launches

—————

The first Ariane 5 launch of the year took place on Mar 8.
The cryogenic main stage entered a marginal orbit with
apogee around 1000 km and reentered over the Pacific
on its first orbit. The EPS upper stage placed the two
payloads in geostationary transfer orbit.

Payloads were EUTELSAT’s Eurobird and the Japanese BSAT-2a. Eurobird is
a Spacebus 3000B3 built by Alcatel (Cannes). Dry mass is probably around
1300 kg. The satellite has an Astrium S400 bipropellant engine.

BSAT-2a is the second Orbital STAR-class television broadcasting
satellite. Its launch mass is 1317 kg; dry mass is 535 kg. The satellite
has a Thiokol Star 30CBP solid apogee motor. Joe Hopkins reports that
the new BSTAR STAR-class satellites are a new design replacing the
earlier Starbus type satellite of which only one (Cakrawarta 1) was
launched. BSAT Corp. (Broadcasting Satellite System Corp.) earlier
launched HS-376 satellites BSAT 1a and 1b, replacing the government’s BS
series which began Japanese direct broadcast services in 1978.

The XM-2 “Rock” satellite was launched on Mar 18. XM Radio’s second
satellite, XM-1 “Roll” will be launched later this year. The XM Radio
satellites will provide digital radio entertainment broadcast to the US.
The satellites are Boeing 702 models. A Boeing Sea Launch Zenit-3SL took
off from the Odyssey floating launch platform at 154W 0N in the Pacific.
The two-stage Zenit put the Blok DM in a suborbital trajectory with a
190 km apogee; the DM first burn went to a 180 x 990 km x 1.3 deg orbit,
with the second burn delivering Rock to geostationary transfer orbit.

A more accurate time for NEAR’s landing on (433) Eros is 1944:17 UTC
on Feb 12, with signal receipt on Earth at 2001:52 UTC.

Table of Recent Launches

———————–

Date UT       Name            Launch Vehicle  Site            Mission    INTL.

                                                                          DES.

Feb  7 2306   Sicral    )       Ariane 44L     Kourou ELA2      Commsat    05A

              Skynet 4F )                                       Commsat    05B

Feb  7 2313   Atlantis (STS-98))Space Shuttle  Kennedy LC39A    Spaceship  06A

              Destiny          )                                Module     06B

Feb 20 0848   Odin              Start-1        Svobodniy        Astronomy  07A

Feb 26 0809   Progress M-44     Soyuz-U        Baykonur LC1     Cargo      08A

Feb 27 2120   Milstar DFS 4     Titan Centaur  Canaveral SLC40  Commsat    09A

Mar  8 1142   Discovery (STS-102) Shuttle      Kennedy LC39B    Spaceship  10A

              Leonardo                                          Module

Mar  8 2251   Eurobird  )       Ariane 5G      Kourou ELA3      Commsat    11A

              BSAT-2a   )                                       Commsat    11B

Mar 18 2233   XM-2 Rock         Zenit-3SL      Odyssey,Pacific  Commsat    12A

Current Shuttle Processing Status

_________________________________

Orbiters               Location   Mission    Launch Due   

OV-102 Columbia        OPF Bay 1     STS-109 2001 Nov 19  HST SM-3B

OV-103 Discovery       OPF Bay 2     STS-105 2001 Jul 12  ISS 7A.1

OV-104 Atlantis        OPF Bay 3     STS-104 2001 Jun  7  ISS 7A

OV-105 Endeavour       LC39A         STS-100 2001 Apr 19  ISS 6A

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|  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 |

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