Jonathan’s Space Report No. 458 2001 Aug 8
B>Shuttle and Station
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The next Shuttle flight is STS-105, scheduled for Aug 9. Discovery will
be flown by Scott Horowitz and Rick Sturckow, with mission specialists
Dan Barry and Patrick Forrester. Space Station Expedition Three
crewmembers Frank Culbertson, Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Tyurin will
also fly aboard Discovery and will relieve the Expedition Two crew
currently aboard the ISS.
The cargo bay contains the Integrated Cargo Carrier platform and
the Leonardo module, and a set of canisters on the sidewall.
The ICC will carry the Early Ammonia Servicer for the P6 truss,
and two small exposure experiments PEC-1 and PEC-2 under the
MISSE materials exposure program, which will be installed on Quest.
The Leonardo module contains Express Racks 4 and 5, as well
as resupply stowage racks.
HEAT is a Hitchhiker payload comprising Simplesat, G-774 and SEM-10, on
two adapter beams on the port and starboard sides of bay 13. The 13P
beam carries G-774 in the forward position and SEM-10 in the aft
position. G-774 is the Microgravity Smoldering Combustion (MSC)
experiment. SEM-10 is a canister with 11 school experiments. The 13S
beam carries the Simplesat can forward and the ACE avionics plate aft.
The 52 kg, 0.48m dia, 0.66m high octagonal cylinder Simplesat was
developed by NASA-Goddard and will be ejected from a canister as a
free-flying satellite to test out GPS attitude control.
Another adapter beam in Bay 4 port carries two half-size (2.5 cubic
foot) GAS canisters. G-780 is a Mayo High School (Rochester, Minnesota)
experiment to study germination of faba beans; aft of it is the PSP-1
(Program Support Package 1) canister for NASA-GSFC which contains
passive experiments and ballast. (Thanks to NASA-GSFC for providing
some of the info on the payload).
Jonathan’s cargo manifest estimate:
Mass/kg
Bay 1-2 Orbiter Docking System/External Airlock 1800
3 EMU spacesuits? 360?
Bay 4P Adapter beam with G-780 and PSP-1 200?
Bay 5 Integrated Cargo Carrier/KYD 1280
Early Ammonia Servicer 640
Bay 7-12 MPLM FM1 (Leonardo) module 9800?
Bay 13P Adapter beam with G-774 and SEM-10 410
Bay 13S Adapter beam with Simplesat and ACE avionics 355
Simplesat 52
Sill RMS arm 410
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Total 15107?
Recent Launches
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MAP flew past the Moon on Jul 30 at 1639 UTC at a distance of 5200 km
above the lunar surface.
Galileo passed Io at a distance of 200 km at 0459 UTC on Aug 6.
Closest approach to Jupiter on this orbit was an altitude of 350000 km
at 0452 UTC on Aug 6.
The satellite launched on Jul 20 was given the name Molniya-3 after
reaching orbit. It is a Molniya-3K satellite, and not a Molniya-1K
satellite as erroneously reported earlier.
A Peackeeper missile was launched from Vandenberg on flight test 30PA on
Jul 27 at around 0801 UTC, but was destroyed during flight and did not
reach its planned 1000 km apogee.
Russia’s first scientific satellite in several years was launched on Jul
31. A Yuzhnoe Tsiklon-3 vehicle took off from Plesetsk at 0800 UTC and
reached transfer orbit at 0807 UTC. The S5M second stage restarted at
0850 UTC and separated a minute later delivering Koronas-F to a 486 x
529 km x 82.5 deg orbit. Koronas-F, an AUOS-SM type solar-pointing
satellite built by Yuzhnoe in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, carries a set of
solar physics instruments.
There were 11 launches of earth-oriented AUOS-Z satellites between 1976
and 1991, followed by development of the two solar-pointing AUOS-SM
satellites AUOS-SM-KI (Koronas-I) and AUOS-SM-KF (Koronas-F), whose
names reflect the two research insitutes who were the original principal
investigators for the experiment payloads. The I satellite, for the
IZMIRAN geophysics institute, was launched in 1994 and reentered earlier
this year. The new F satellite carries that designation because the
original lead organization was the Lebedev institute known as FIAN in
Russian, although it also carries experiments from IZMIRAN and other
research centers.
A new US Air Force Defense Support Program infrared missile early
warning satellite was launched on Aug 6. The Lockheed Martin Titan 4B
took off from Cape Canaveral into a 328 x 663 km x 28.7 deg parking
orbit. The Boeing IUS-16 upper stage then fired its first solid motor to
enter geostationary transfer orbit. The second IUS solid motor fired at
around 1400 UTC placing DSP Flight 21 in near-geosynchronous orbit. The
DSP satellites are built by TRW and have a mass of about 2300 kg.
The Genesis probe was launched from Cape Canaveral on Aug 8. Genesis
will fly to the Earth-Sun L1 point and spend two years collecting
samples of the solar wind. A follow on to such experiments as the solar
wind collectors exposed on the Moon by Apollo astronauts, Genesis will
allow scientists to determine the chemical and isotopic composition of
the Sun. The collected samples will be physically returned to Earth
(landing in Utah) and analysed in ground-based laboratories. Among the
goals are an attempt to study why the oxygen isotopic composition seems
to vary in the solar system, accurate measurement of argon, xenon and
neon abundances, and isotope ratio abundance measurements accurate to
one percent for a broad range of elements.
Genesis is part of NASA’s Discovery program. The spacecraft and sample
return capsule were built by Lockheed Martin Astronautics; mass is 494
kg dry (includin the 220 kg return capsule), 636 kg at launch. The craft
is 1.3m high with a 1.52m diameter capsule, and has a 6.8m span when
deployed. The vehicle will enter a 6-month-period halo orbit around L1
with a radius of 800000 km when it arrives on station later this year.
The craft carries a pure hydrazine propulsion system, and a sample
return capsule with deployable sample collection plates and an ion
concentrator that rejects protons (80 percent of the solar wind) in
favour of the trace elements it is trying to study.
Launch was by a Boeing Delta 7326 vehicle, a Delta II variant with three
strap-on motors and a lightweight Star 37 third stage. The first burn of
the Delta second stage put Genesis in a 185 x 197 km x 28.5 deg parking
orbit at 1624 UTC. At 1712 UTC the second burn raised the orbit to 182 x
3811 km, and at 1713 UTC the third stage fired to put Genesis on its
trajectory to L1 with a nominal apogee of around 1.2 million km.
Table of Recent Launches
———————–
Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL.
DES.Jul 12 0904 Atlantis STS-104) Shuttle Kennedy LC39B Spaceship 28A
Quest ) Station module
Jul 12 2158 Artemis ) Ariane 5G Kourou ELA3 Expt. comms 29A
BSAT-2b ) Ku video 29B
Jul 20 0017 Molniya-3 Molniya-M Plesetsk LC43/4 Comms 30A
Jul 23 0723 GOES 12 Atlas IIA Canaveral SLC36A Weather 31A
Jul 31 0800 Koronas-F Tsiklon-3 Plesetsk LC32 Astronomy 32A
Aug 6 0728 DSP 21 Titan 4B/IUS Canaveral SLC40 Early Warn 33A
Aug 8 1613 Genesis Delta 7326 Canaveral SLC17A Space probe
Current Shuttle Processing Status
_________________________________
Orbiters Location Mission Launch DueOV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 3 STS-109 2002 Jan 17 HST SM-3B
OV-103 Discovery LC39A STS-105 2001 Aug 9 ISS 7A.1
OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 2 STS-110 2002 Feb 28 ISS 8A
OV-105 Endeavour OPF Bay 1 STS-108 2001 Nov 29 ISS UF-1
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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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