Jonathan's Space Report No. 537 2004 Oct 27, Pasadena, CA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Space Station and Shuttle Soyuz TMA-5 docked with the Pirs module on Oct 16 at 0416 UTC. Sharipov, Chiao, Shargin, Padalka and Fincke spent a week aboard the Station and at 1814 UTC on Oct 23 Padalka, Fincke and Shargin entered Soyuz TMA-4 and closed the hatches leaving Chiao and Sharipov as the Station crew. Soyuz TMA-4 undocked at 2108 UTC and made a small separation burn at 2111 UTC. At 2342 UTC the deorbit burn lowered the orbit from 353 x 366 km to -23 x 355 km, and the descent module separated at 0008 UTC on Oct 24, with landing at 50.47N 67.12E near Arkalyk at 0036 UTC. A significant milestone on the way to the next Shuttle flight is expected in early November. The RSRM-90 solid rocket motors will be taken to High Bay 1 of the Vehicle Assembly Building and placed on Mobile Launch Platform 1 to begin the assembly of booster stack BI-124. The ET-120 external tank, with redesigns to prevent foam loss, will arrive at KSC in January and be stacked in February, while Discovery is prepared in Orbiter Processing Facility Bay 3. NASA now hopes to launch Discovery on mission STS-114 in May. * Cassini The Cassini-Huygens space probe made a flyby of Titan on Oct 26. The Ta flyby closest approach was at 1530 UTC at an altitude of 1200 km above Titan's surface. (Light travel time to Earth was 1hr 14min so this corresponds to an Earth Received signal time of 1644 UTC, reported in some sources as the flyby time.) Cassini is falling inward towards Saturn, with closest approach at 1019 UTC on Oct 28; the Titan flyby changed the orbit to about 0.3 x 4.6 million km inclined 13.8 deg to the ring plane. This lowered the apoapsis by a factor 2 and sets the probe up for the Tb flyby of Titan on Dec 13. * Genesis In JSR 534 I incorrectly reported that the bus section of the Genesis space probe burned up over the Pacific after capsule separation. Although this had been the original mission plan as still reported on the Genesis website, in fact the bus maneuvered to miss the Earth. The Genesis sample return capsule was ejected from its parent spacecraft at 1153 UTC on September 8 at an altitude of 59600 km, and entered the atmosphere four hours later at 1555 UTC. Meanwhile, the spacecraft bus made a course change at 1208 UTC, at an altitude of 56700 km, to raise its perigee from a few kilometers below the Earth's surface to a height of 242 km, allowing it to just miss the atmosphere and head out to deep space. The incoming trajectory was a geocentric orbit of around -1 x 1376362 km x 52.0 deg, with the 'vacuum perigee' (the path the return capsule would have taken if Earth didn't have an atmosphere) grazing the surface of the Earth. (Note that the error bar on my calculation of the perigee is several km). The perigee raise burn changed this to a 242 x 1350949 km x 52.0 deg orbit, missing the atmosphere nicely at 1558 UTC. The Genesis bus passed lunar orbit outbound early on Sep 11. It will come back in for a new perigee on Nov 6, by which time lunisolar perturbations will have changed the orbit to 60672 x 1454293 km x 41.9 deg, and will reach apogee again toward the end of the year. An extended `Exodus' mission for solar wind monitoring has been proposed which would have used a small burn to put the Genesis bus in a solar orbit near that of the Earth, but I believe that mission has not so far been funded. (Thanks to DC Agle of JPL for the sep and course change times). * FSW 20 The FSW recoverable satellite launched by China on Sep 27 returned to Earth at 0248 UTC on Oct 15, falling through the roof of a house in the village of Penglai, Sichuan province. * FY-2C The third Fengyun-2 weather satellite, and the first of the operational 'batch 2' model, was launched by a Chang Zheng 3A rocket on Oct 19. The 1380 kg satellite fired its apogee motor at around 1730 UTC on Oct 19 to enter a drifting geostationary orbit. The FG-36 apogee motor was probably ejected from the satellite around that time. Xinhua reports that the prelaunch name of the satellite is FY-2 04, and the postlaunch name is FY-2C. Prelaunch Postlaunch FY-2 01 - Destroyed in ground fire 1994. FY-2 02 FY-2A 1997 Jun 10; in reserve 2000 May at 86E FY-2 03 FY-2B 2000 Jun 25; at 123E FY-2 04 FY-2C 2004 Oct 19; in transfer orbit Table of Recent Launches ----------------------- Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Sep 6 1053 'Ofeq-6 Shaviyt Palmachim Imaging F01 Sep 8 2314 SJ-6A ) CZ-4B Taiyuan Science 35A SJ-6B ) Science 35B Sep 20 1031 EDUSAT GSLV SDSC Comms 36A Sep 23 1507 Kosmos-2408 ) Kosmos-3M Plesetsk Comms 37A Kosmos-2409 ) Comms 37B Sep 24 1650 Kosmos-2410 Soyuz-U Plesetsk LC16 Imaging 38A Sep 27 0800 FSW 20 CZ-2D Jiuquan Imaging? 39A Oct 14 0306 Soyuz TMA-5 Soyuz-FG Baykonur LC1/5 Spaceship 40A Oct 14 2123 AMC 15 Proton-M/Briz-M Baykonur LC200/39 Comms 41A Oct 19 0120 FY-2C CZ-3A Xichang Weather 42A .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Somerville MA 02143 | inter : jcm@host.planet4589.org | | USA | jcm@cfa.harvard.edu | | | | JSR: http://www.planet4589.org/jsr.html | | Back issues: http://www.planet4589.org/space/jsr/back | | Subscribe/unsub: mail majordomo@host.planet4589.org, (un)subscribe jsr | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'