Jonathan's Space Report No. 106 1992 Mar 9 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Atlantis/STS-45 is on pad 39A at KSC, awaiting launch on March 23. Endeavour was transferred to VAB bay 2 on Mar 7 for mating with the tank and boosters for mission STS-49, the Intelsat rescue mission. Columbia is being processed for mission STS-50, the first Extended Duration Orbiter mission. Discovery is undergoing modifications and will next fly in October. Mir crew Aleksandr Volkov and Sergey Krikalyov made a 4h spacewalk on Feb 20 for external experiment retreival and routine maintenance. Launch of Soyuz TM-14 is due on Mar 17. An Ariane 44L orbited two satellites on Feb 26. Superbird B2 is a communications satellite belonging to Space Communications Corp. of Japan. Arabsat 1C is an Arab League comsat. A Molniya communications spacecraft was launched on Mar 4. It is probably owned by the Russian Ministry of Communications, Information and Space.(Ministerstva po svyazi informatike i kosmosu). The first Indian satellite Aryabhata reentered on Feb 11. A Meteor-Priroda earth resources satellite reentered on Mar 1 after 12 years in orbit. The Russian Gamma 1 gamma ray astronomy satellite reentered on Feb 28 after only 2 years in orbit; the main experiment on board was reportedly a failure. Kosmos 2075, a military satellite, reentered on Feb 20. ____________________________________________ |Current STS status: | |Orbiters Location Mission | | | |OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 3 STS-50 | |OV-103 Discovery OPF Bay 2 Mod | |OV-104 Atlantis LC39A STS-45 | |OV-105 Endeavour VAB Bay 2 STS-49 | | | |ML/ET/SRB stacks | | | |ML1/STS-45/ET/OV-104 LC39A | |ML2/STS-49/ET VAB Bay 2 | |ML3/STS-50 VAB Bay 3 | -------------------------------------------- .-----------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for | | | Astrophysics | | | 60 Garden St, MS4 | | | Cambridge MA 02138 | inter : mcdowell@cfa.harvard.edu | | USA | | '-----------------------------------------------------------------------------'