Jonathan’s Space Report No. 473 1 Mar 2002
Shuttle and Station
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Carl Walz and Dan Bursch made a spacewalk on Feb 20 using the Station’s
Quest airlock. Depressurization was at around 1134 UTC and
repressurization was at 1725 UTC. The spacewalk involved doing some
preparatory work with cables and thermal covers in advance of the
spacewalks planned for STS-110 and the installation of the S0 truss. It
was also intended to check out proper functioning of the Quest airlock,
which had some minor problems on its first use in Jul 2001. The last two
Expedition-4 spacewalks were made from the Russian Pirs airlock.
Launch of STS-109 is scheduled for Mar 1.
Recent Launches
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The first Lockheed Martin Astronautics Atlas 3B was launched on Feb 21.
The Atlas 3B features the new Common Centaur stretched two-engine upper
stage, also planned for use on the Atlas 5.
Atlas AC-204 placed the Echostar 7 communications satellite in
geostationary transfer orbit. The Atlas III first stage, using a Russian
RD-180 main engine, fired first, followed by the first burn of the
Centaur, which entered a 185 x 193 km x 28.1 deg parking orbit. At
1305 UTC the Centaur burned again to achieve the final 245 x 57060 km x
22.6 deg transfer orbit and separated from Echostar.
Arianespace launched an Ariane 44L from Kourou on Feb 23. The Loral
FS-1300HL-class Intelsat 904 satellite it placed in a 176 x 35812 km x 7.0
deg geostationary transfer orbit will be used for Indian Ocean region
communications. Intelsat 904 has a dry mass of 2350 kg and carries
a further 2330 kg of fuel.
Arianespace had another success on Mar 1 when the Ariane 5 returned to
flight with mission V145/vehicle 511. This vehicle, the first Ariane 5
to use the 17-m Long Fairing and the first to launch north from Kourou,
placed the European Space Agency’s Envisat polar platform in orbit.
Originally envisaged as an automated polar orbiting segment of the
Space Station, and later descoped to become something like the
European equivalent of NASA’s Earth Observing System, Envisat
uses a new modular satellite bus built at Matra Marconi Space/Bristol,
now shut down – final integration was done at ESTEC in the Netherlands.
The service module (SVM) is based on the SPOT 4 design; prime contractor
is Astrium (Dornier). Envisat has a dry mass of 7911 kg and carries
300 kg of hydrazine for orbit adjust. The active C-band phased array
ASAR radar imaging antenna is 1.3 x 10m in size; Envisat also carries
atmospheric radiometers and spectrometers and a radar altimeter.
The V145 flight profile was quite different from earlier Ariane 5 GTO
launches where the EPC core stage usually reached a marginal orbit. In
this case EPC separation at 350 km high 10 min after launch left the EPC
in a suborbital trajectory impacting in the Arctic; the EPS final stage
with Envisat only achieved a positive perigee at 22 minutes after
launch, with a circular 790 km sun-synchronous orbit reached at 25 min
after launch.
Kosmos-2387 was launched on Feb 25 from Plesetsk. The satellite,
built by TsSKB-Progress of Samara, is a Kobal’t-class imaging
spy satellite. It carries two small film capsules and a large
reentry module. The KVR (Russian Space Forces) launched it on
a Soyuz-U into a 165 x 344 km x 67.1 deg orbit. The previous
mission of this class, Kosmos-2377, flew from May to October last year.
Table of Recent Launches
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Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL.
DES.
Jan 16 0030 Milstar FLT-5 Titan Centaur Canaveral SLC40 Comms 01A
Jan 23 2347 Insat 3C Ariane 42L Kourou ELA2 Comms 02A
Feb 4 0245 MDS-1 ) H-2A Tanegashima Tech 03A
DASH ) Tech 03
VEP-3 ) Tech 03
Feb 5 2058 HESSI Pegasus XL Canaveral Astronomy 04A
Feb 11 1743 Iridium ) Delta 7920 Vandenberg SLC2W Comms 05A
Iridium ) 05B
Iridium ) 05C
Iridium ) 05D
Iridium ) 05E
Feb 21 1243 Echostar 7 Atlas 3B Canaveral SLC36B Comms 06A
Feb 23 0659 Intelsat 904 Ariane 44L Kourou ELA2 Comms 07A
Feb 25 1726 Kosmos-2387 Soyuz-U Plesetsk LC43/3 Imaging 08A
Mar 1 0108 Envisat Ariane 5G Kourou ELA3 Rem.Sensing
Current Shuttle Processing Status
_________________________________
Orbiters Location Mission Launch DueOV-102 Columbia LC39A STS-109 2002 Mar 1 HST SM-3B
OV-103 Discovery VAB Maintenance
OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 2? STS-110 2002 Apr 4 ISS 8A
OV-105 Endeavour OPF Bay 1? STS-111 2002 May 2 ISS UF-2
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| Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 |
| Harvard-Smithsonian Center for | |
| Astrophysics | |
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| Cambridge MA 02138 | inter : jcm@cfa.harvard.edu |
| USA | jmcdowell@cfa.harvard.edu |
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