Jonathan's Space Report Aug 1 1990 (no.46) ---------------------------------------------------- Atlantis failed its tanking test; now Columbia gets another go. Launch of STS-35 due no earlier than Aug 30. ___________________________________ |Current STS status: | |Orbiters | | | |OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 2 | |OV-103 Discovery OPF Bay 1 | |OV-104 Atlantis LC39A | | | |ET/SRB stacks | | | |STS-35 VAB Bay 3 | |STS-38/OV104 LC39A | |STS-41 VAB Bay 1 | ----------------------------------- (Acronym list: OV Orbiter Vehicle OPF Orbiter Processing Facility VAB Vehicle Assembly Building LC Launch Complex STS Space Transportation System) Vladimir Solov'yov and Aleksandr Balandin made another spacewalk on Jul 26 to complete the Soyuz TM-9 repair and close the Kvant-2 EVA hatch. The EVA appears to have been successful. Soyuz TM-10 was launched Aug 1 with crew Gennadiy Manakov (Komandir) and Gennadiy Strekalov (Bortinzhener). The TM-9 crew will land Aug 9; the TM-10 crew will stay up until December. Arianespace successfully launched an Ariane IV on Jul 24. The two payloads heading for geostationary orbit are TDF 2 and Kopernikus DFS 2, both television direct broadcasting satellites. The first is for the French TV channel Telediffusion de France, and the second is for the Deutsche Bundespost (DFS stands for Deutsche FernsehenSatellit, German for German TV Satellite). The DoD/NASA CRRES (Combined Release and Radiation Effects Satellite) was launched into elliptical orbit on Jul 25 by the first commercial Atlas I Centaur. The satellite carries experiments to study the magnetosphere and ionosphere, and will also carry out chemical releases to allow visual observations of the Earth's magnetic field. (Ions released into the field glow pretty colors as they move along the field lines). Congratulations Nick, I hope you get good data. A Resurs-F remote sensing satellite was launched on Jul 17. Kosmos-2085, launched on Jul 18, is a geostationary comsat. Kosmos-2086, launched on Jul 20, is a polar recon satellite. Kosmos-2087, launched on Jul 25, is an early warning satellite. Orbital Verification of the HST continues. Software errors continue to be found; controllers have been playing with the secondary mirror and have been using the off-axis FOC camera to study the image quality. Instrument testing continues; there are a few problems but nothing too major yet. The HST science institute (STScI) logo used to be a graphic of rays coming to a focus. In the revised version spotted recently on STScI office doors, the rays come to two different foci and the motto below is "ABERRARE HUMANUM EST". (c) 1990 Jonathan McDowell