Jonathan's Space Report<br />No. 532 2004 Aug 9, Somerville, MA<br />-------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />* Space Station<br />Sender: owner-jsr@host.planet4589.org<br />Precedence: bulk<br />Reply-To: jcm@host.planet4589.org@host.planet4589.org<br /><br />The Progress M-49 cargo ship, which has been docked to the Space Station<br />since May 27, undocked at 0605 UTC on Jul 30 and carried out a deorbit<br />burn at 1039 UTC leading to reentry over the Pacific starting at 1114<br />UTC. Progress M-50 is being prepared for launch to bring new supplies to<br />the stations. Astronauts Padalka and Fincke made a spacewalk on Aug 3,<br />in Orlan-M suits 25 and 26, during which they installed rendezvous and<br />docking hardware for the European Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV),<br />scheduled to launch next year. The Pirs airlock was depressurized by<br />0642 UTC, with the hatch opened at 0658 UTC. The astronauts reentered<br />the airlock at 1116-1120 UTC and closed the hatch at 1128 UTC. Pirs was<br />repressurized at 1129 UTC. During the spacewalk, the torques on the<br />station from the astronauts' work (or, according to Jim Oberg,<br />outgassing from the spacesuit sublimators) were enough to exceed the<br />capacity of the CMG gyros in the Z1 module, and thrusters had to be used<br />to reorient the station. The spacewalk lasted 4h 48 min (depress to<br />repress at 50 mbar) or 4h 30min (hatch open/close). Thanks as usual to<br />Andrey Krasil'nikov for EVA details.<br /><br />* Hubble<br /><br />One of the Hubble Space Telescope's premier science instruments failed<br />on August 3. A power converter has blown in the main electronics box for<br />the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), the only instrument on<br />HST that can take spectra, leaving the spectrograph permanently<br />unusable. This is a huge blow to astronomers, since spectra are needed<br />to study the chemical composition and physical state of the objects<br />Hubble studies, as well as measuring redshifts of galaxies and gas<br />velocities around black holes - all science goals that the imaging<br />instruments cannot help with. STIS's ultraviolet capability is unique -<br />since ultraviolet light from space doesn't reach ground-based telescopes<br />- leaving astronomers without any way to study the important ultraviolet<br />spectral fingerprints of ionized hydrogen and carbon crucial to studies<br />of quasars and of the atmospheres of hot stars. Hubble's sharp imaging<br />also helped STIS, allowing spectra of very small regions - such as the<br />nuclei of galaxies - to be picked out from the middle of larger<br />sources, key in pinning down the presence of massive black holes in the<br />nuclei of galaxies. STIS was added to Hubble on the second servicing<br />mission in February 1997, replacing two earlier instruments, the Faint<br />Object Spectrograph and the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph. Its<br />successor, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), is ready for launch<br />but grounded indefinitely because of the ban on post-Columbia Shuttle<br />missions to Hubble.<br /><br />* NASA Discovery Program<br /><br />The MESSENGER probe to Mercury was launched on Aug 3. The Boeing Delta<br />7925H went into parking orbit from Cape Canaveral; the second stage's<br />second burn raised the orbit, and then the PAM-D solid motor burn put<br />the probe on an escape trajectory. MESSENGER will pass lunar orbit at<br />0600 UTC on Aug 4 and leave the Earth's sphere of influence at around<br />1800 UTC on Aug 5, entering a 0.92 x 1.08 AU x 6.4 deg heliocentric<br />orbit, with a perihelion about 0.0013 AU (200000 km) larger than<br />planned, due to a 15 m/s underspeed on the third stage burn. MESSENGER<br />(Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) will make<br />an Earth flyby on 2005 Aug 1, Venus flybys in 2006 and 2007, and Mercury<br />encounters in 2008 Jan, 2008 Oct, 2009 Sep and 2011 Mar. On the fourth<br />encounter the Aerojet 660N engine will fire to put Messenger in a 200 x<br />15193 km x 80 deg orbit around the innermost planet.<br /><br />* Proton launch<br /><br />International Launch Services and Krunichev launched Proton-M no. 53507<br />with upper stage Briz-M No. 88510 on Aug 4, carrying the Amazonas 1<br />communications satellite. Amazonas, a Eurostar 3000 model satellite built<br />by Astrium, is owned by the Spanish company Hispasat and will be<br />operated by its Brazilian Hispamar subsidiary. The Briz upper<br />stage put Amazonas in a 3142 x 35789 km x 9.1 deg transfer orbit.<br /><br />* Assorted probes<br /><br />The European ion-drive lunar probe, SMART-1, launched in Sep 2003 into<br />geostationary transfer orbit, had by Jul 12 reached a 22361 x 155133<br />km x 6.9 deg orbit, having used about 41 kg of xenon propellant.<br /><br />The final stage of the Chinese/European Double Star 2 (Tan Ce 2) probe<br />has not yet been tracked. Tan Ce 2 is in a 654 x 38573 km x 90.0 deg<br />polar orbit with apogee over the Arctic Circle.<br /><br />* Historical note: Astrofizika<br /><br />The latest issue of the Russian magazine Novosti Kosmonavtiki (NK), in an<br />interesting article on the history of the Meteor weather satellite<br />system, provides the first details on the mysterious satellite<br />Kosmos-1066 launched in December 1978. Kosmos-1066 was identified by<br />Igor Lissov and Sergey Voevodin on the FPSPACE list in 1997 as being the<br />cover name for the article 11F653 spacecraft 'Astrofizika', but we<br />didn't know what it was for. The Astrofizika name suggested a possible<br />astrophysics payload but no science results had been reported. The new<br />NK article quotes Yuriy Trifonov, director of VNII Elektromekhaniki, the<br />design organization for the Meteors, as saying that Kosmos-1066 was<br />based on Meteor-1 and carried special optical instruments for the<br />observation of artificially created `light sources' on Earth; the craft<br />carried an SPD-50 electric thruster like those on Meteor-Priroda to<br />allow its orbit to be adjusted to pass over the experiment sites. The<br />Astrofizika satellite is believed to have operated for almost two years.<br /><br />NK speculate the experiments may have been military in nature, and I<br />note that the main USSR organization for the development of directed<br />energy weapons was called NPO Astrofizika. Maybe the satellite was<br />measuring laser signal strength from an experimental laser at the<br />Terra-3 facility to study propagation energy losses, for future<br />application to beam weapons, or something of that kind - I emphasize,<br />for the benefit of those inclined to overhype, that I am not suggesting<br />an actual beam weapon delivering significant energy on target, just a<br />jumped-up satellite tracking laser.<br /><br />Table of Recent Launches<br />-----------------------<br /><br />Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. <br /> DES.<br /><br />Jul 15 1002 Aura Delta 7920 Vandenberg SLC2W Science 26A<br />Jul 18 0044 Anik F2 Ariane 5G+ Kourou ELA3 Comms 27A<br />Jul 22 1746 Kosmos-2407 Kosmos-3M Plesetsk LC132 Navigation 28A<br />Jul 25 0705 Tan Ce 2 CZ-2C/SM Taiyuan Science 29A<br />Aug 3 0616 MESSENGER Delta 7925H Canaveral SLC17B Probe 30A<br />Aug 4 2232 Amazonas Proton-M/Briz-M Baykonur LC200/39 Comms 31A<br /><br />.-------------------------------------------------------------------------.<br />| Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 |<br />| Somerville MA 02143 | inter : jcm@host.planet4589.org |<br />| USA | jcm@cfa.harvard.edu |<br />| |<br />| JSR: http://www.planet4589.org/jsr.html |<br />| Back issues: http://www.planet4589.org/space/jsr/back |<br />| Subscribe/unsub: mail majordomo@host.planet4589.org, (un)subscribe jsr | <br />'-------------------------------------------------------------------------'