Jonathan's Space Report
No. 286 1996 May 8 Cambridge, MA
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Shuttle and Mir
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The Progress M-31 cargo ship, spacecraft No. 231, was launched on May 5
It will deliver 1140 kg of fuel and 1700 kg of cargo to the Mir complex.
The Progress is a modified Soyuz with a fuel tank in place of the
descent module, and is built by RKK Energiya for the Russian Space
Agency.
The Progress docked at the -X port on Mir at 0854 UTC on May 7 according
to an AP report. On Apr 27 the Priroda (spacecraft No. 77KSI) module was
rotated from -X to +Z. The batteries used to power Priroda on its trip
to Mir have been removed from the module and will be placed in Progress
M-31 for disposal during reentry. Mir crew Yuriy Onufrienko, Yuriy
Usachyov and Shannon Lucid will remain on the station until August.
Endeavour remains on pad 39B as preparations for the launch of STS-77
continue. Launch is now set for May 19. Meanwhile, the external tank and
solid boosters for STS-78 have been connected.
New NASA Astronauts
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A new group of 35 NASA astronaut candidates has been selected. This
equals the 1978 group as the largest selection ever. There are ten
pilots and 25 mission specialists; eight of the mission specialists are
women. Three of the pilots are surnamed Kelly, two of them being twins -
Mark and Scott Kelly, both Navy lieutenants. Half the pilots are
currently at the Navy test pilot base at Patuxent River, Maryland, which
has sent many people on to the astronaut office. The other traditional
source, the Air Force test pilot base at Edwards, generated only one
pilot and one mission specialist this time around. Of the civilians, one
comes from Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Pegasus rocket program, two from Los
Alamos, and two from Georgia Tech. The remainder are from NASA related
centers: three from JSC (Houston), two from Kennedy, two from Goddard,
and one each from Langley and JPL. This is a bit broader than some
earlier selections which tended to pick almost all the civilians from
JSC. All the new candidates were born in the USA except for GSFC's Dr.
Piers Sellers who was born in England. None of the previous (1994)
group of astronauts has yet been selected for a mission.
Recent Launches
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Lockheed Martin's Atlas I Centaur flight AC-78 was launched on Apr 30
from Cape Canaveral. AC-78's Centaur second stage made two burns, the
second changing the orbital plane to lower the inclination to the equator,
delivering its payload to a 581 x 605 km x 4.0 deg orbit.
This is probably the lowest inclination payload launched from Cape
Canaveral with the exception of geostationary missions.
The AC-78 payload was SAX, the Italian Space Agency's Satellite per
Astronomia a raggi X. SAX carries a set of 30 nested, gold coated
concentrators with detectors to study the spectrum of X-ray sources over
a wide energy range, from photon energies of 0.1 to 200 keV and an
approximately 1 degree field of view. Three Xenon gas scintillation
proportional counters (GSPCs) study the 1-10 keV range, while a fourth,
the LEGSPC, studies the 0.1-1 keV range. A High Pressure GSPC (HPGSPC)
coveres the hard X-ray range of 3-120 keV, while the PDS (Phoswich
Detector System) is sensitive up to 200 keV. All of these instruments
are in the focal plane of the X-ray concentrator telescope. They don't
have the collecting area of the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, but they
have better spatial resolution since Rossi doesn't have an imaging
telescope. Previous missions like Einstein, ROSAT and Rossi don't cover
the full X-ray energy range (Einstein and ROSAT didn't have the hard
energies, Rossi and Asuka don't have the soft energies), and X-ray
sources are so variable that if you want to have the big picture you
need get the whole range simultaneously, so SAX fills an important
niche. An auxiliary coded mask telescope pointing out to the side uses
Dutch-built Wide Field Cameras to study a much larger 20 degree field
of view for monitoring transient sources in the 2-30 keV range. The
Dutch NIVR space agency collaborates with ASI (Agenzia Spaziale
Italiano) on the SAX project, as well as the European Space Agency's
ESTEC research center, also in Holland, which built the LEGSPC. SAX was
built by the Italian company Alenia.
The classified satellite launched on Apr 24 is probably an advanced
version of the VORTEX signals intelligence spacecraft. The launch
vehicle used powerful twin solid rocket motors built by UTC-CSD. These
separated two minutes into flight from the liquid-propellant Lockheed
Martin (orig. Martin Marietta) Titan K-16 two-stage core vehicle. The
23-m payload shroud separated at about four minutes after launch. At
about nine minutes into flight the Lockheed Martin (orig. General
Dynamics) Centaur TC-15 upper stage ignited in the first of three burns
to geostationary orbit. The payload designation has now been
confirmed as USA 118.
Table of Recent Launches
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Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL.
DES.
Apr 3 2301 Inmarsat III F1 Atlas IIA Canaveral LC36 Comsat 20A
Apr 8 2309 Astra 1F Proton-K/DM2 Baykonur Comsat 21A
Apr 20 2236 M-SAT 1 Ariane 42P Kourou ELA2 Comsat 22A
Apr 23 1148 Priroda Proton-K Baykonur Spaceship 23A
Apr 24 1227 MSX Delta 7920 Vandenberg SLC2W Mil.tech. 24A
Apr 24 1303 Kosmos-2332 Kosmos-3M Plesetsk Radar cal 25A
Apr 24 2337 USA-118 Titan 401 Canaveral LC41 Sigint 26A
Apr 30 0431 SAX Atlas I Canaveral LC36B Astronomy 27A
May 5 0704 Progress M-31 Soyuz-U Baykonur Cargo 28A
Current Shuttle Processing Status
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Orbiters Location Mission Launch Due
OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 2 STS-78 Jun 27
OV-103 Discovery Palmdale OMDP
OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 1 STS-79 Jul 31
OV-105 Endeavour LC39B STS-77 May 19
ML/SRB/ET/OV stacks
ML1/RSRM-47/ET-78/OV-105 LC39B STS-77
ML2/RSRM-54 VAB Bay 1 STS-79
ML3/RSRM-55/ET-79 VAB Bay 3 STS-78
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| 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 |
| ftp://sao-ftp.harvard.edu/pub/jcm/space/news/news.* |
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