Jonathan's Space Report No. 544 2005 Feb 12, Somerville, MA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Space Station ------------- Expedition 10 astronauts Chiao and Sharipov made a spacewalk from the Pirs module on Jan 26. Hatch open was at 0741 UTC, hatch close at 1311 UTC. The airlock reached 50 mbar pressure at 0725 UTC and was repressurized at 1313 UTC for a depressurized duration of 5h48m. Chiao used spacesuit Orlan-M No. 25 and Sharipov used suit Orlan-M No. 27. They installed the German 'Rokviss' robot arm on the Zvezda module, deployed an experiment package, and discovered contaminating residue on the vents from the Elektron oxygen generators. During the installation of cabling between Rokviss and its antenna, between 0817 and 1057 UTC, a total of at least 12 (and possibly 20) plastic and steel connector caps were jettisoned into space; these were apparently not tracked by Space Command. Thanks as usual to Andrey Krasil'nikov for all these EVA details. Orlan-M No. 25 was launched on Progress M1-11 and used by Gennadiy Padalka on the Expedition 9 spacewalks. Orlan-M No. 27 was launched on Progress M-49 and was used for the first time on this spacewalk. Ariane 5ECA ----------- Arianespace, CNES and ESA launched the second Ariane 5ECA, vehicle 521, from Kourou on Feb 12 at 2103 UTC. Flight V164 was the first 5ECA to reach orbit, following the loss of vehicle 517 on flight V157 in 2002 during the burn of the first stage Vulcain 2 engine. This time the Vulcain 2 performed well, and the EPC core stage entered a -1419 x 212 km x 7.3 deg suborbital path, falling in the Gulf of Guinea at 2120 UTC. The upper stage ESC-A, which didn't get a chance to perform on the previous flight, added another 2.6 km/s of speed to put the payload in geostationary transfer orbit (At this writing, orbital parameters had not been confirmed). The main payload is XTAR-EUR, an X-band military communications satellite opwnd by Hisdesat/XTAR of Spain and built by Loral. XTAR-EUR is an SS/L 1300 satellite with a mass of 1412 kg as well as 2219 kg of propellant. Below XTAR-EUR in the fairing was Maqsat-B2, a test satellite built by Kayser-Threde to study the Ariane 5ECA launch environment. Maqsat-B2 remained attached to the upper stage but ejected the small 127 kg SLOSHSAT-FLEVO test satellite, which will study the sloshing of fluids on orbit. SLOSHSAT, developed by the Netherlands Aerospace Lab (NLR), has a tank with 33.5 liters of water and an attitude control system. Kosmos-2410 ----------- The test flight of the improved Kobal't spy satellite came to an end after 107 days, about half its expected lifetime. The main recovery vehicle was deorbited from its 183 x 288 km x 67.1 deg orbit around 0700 UTC on Jan 9 and is presumed to have landed in Russia around 0720 UTC, but has not been found by Russian forces. Two objects were ejected from the satellite on Jan 8 into low orbits and reentered within a day; I speculate that they may have been unused small film recovery capsules, two of which were carried on earlier Kobal't models. Kosmos-2414 ----------- In the last JSR I mentioned that the Kosmos-2414 orbit was a little lower than the normal Parus navsat orbit. Information from OHB System confirms that the Kosmos-3M rocket performed nominally. The target orbit was lower than usual because of the heavy SAR-Lupe fairing and the secondary payload. AMC-12 ------ The Americom 12 satellite, also known as Worldsat 2, was launched on Feb 3 from Baykonur into geostationary transfer orbit. The launch used a Proton-M rocket with a Briz-M upper stage. AMC-12 is the first Alcatel Spacebus 4000 satellite to be launched; the SB 4000 is a larger version of the SB 3000, with a launch mass around 5000 kg. Meanwhile, some astronomers got a nice picture of the launch on Dec 17 of AMC-16, showing the unexpectedly bright fuel dump from the Centaur AV-005 stage, at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050208.html. USA 181 ------- The last Atlas launch took place on Feb 3 from Cape Canaveral with two classified National Reconnaissance Office payloads. Flight AC-206 used an Atlas IIIB with a single-engine Centaur IIIB; amateur observers are tracking the two payloads in a 1011 x 1209 km x 63.4 deg orbit; the Centaur fuel dump left it in a 993 x 1205 km x 63.7 deg orbit. The two USA 181 payloads are thought to be US Navy signals intelligence satellites using radio interferometry to locate ships via their radio signals. There were 587 Atlas launches beginning with the Atlas 4A missile test in Jun 1957. The 3-meter Atlas, with its thin, pressure-stabilized, balloon tank, used a discardable 'stage-and-a-half' booster engine package except for the six Russian-engined Atlas III flights between 2000 and 2005. The new Atlas V rocket uses a 3.8-meter diameter first stage with a structurally rigid tank and is an essentially different design from the traditional Atlas. Semi-Erratum: ------------ Steve Pietrobon points out that Messenger and DI were originally Discovery-8 and Discovery-7 respectively, not the other way around. I'm not sure if NASA management is still tracking them internally with these designations. Table of Recent Launches ----------------------- Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Jan 12 1847 Deep Impact Delta 7925 Canaveral SLC17B Comet probe 01A Jan 20 0300 Kosmos-2414 ) Kosmos-3M Plesetsk PL132/1 Navigation 02A Universitetskiy ) Tech 02C Feb 3 0227 AMC 12 Proton-M/Briz-M Baykonur PL81/24 Comms 03A Feb 3 0741 USA 181 ) Atlas 3B Canaveral SLC36B Sigint 04A USA 181 P/L 2 ) 04C Feb 12 2103 XTAR-EUR ) Ariane 5ECA Kourou ELA3 Comms 05 Maqsat-B2 ) Tech 05 SLOSHSAT ) Tech 05 .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | 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 | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'