Jonathan's Space Report No. 462 2001 Sep 26 Cambridge, MA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shuttle and Station -------------------- The Expedition 3 crew continues work on the Station. The Progress M-SO1 vehicle is still docked to the Pirs airlock/docking module and will be undocked and deorbited in late September. Around the Solar System ----------------------- Deep Space 1 has completed its flyby of comet 19P/Borrelly. The spacecraft flew past the nucleus at a distance of 2200 km at 2230 UTC on 2001 Sep 22 and appears to have survived the encounter in good shape, sending back photos of the comet. Congratulations to Marc Rayman and the DS1 team for a remarkable feat of interplanetary navigation. DS1 is in a roughly 1.3 x 1.5 AU x 0 deg (ecliptic) orbit; Borrelly's orbit is 1.3 x 5.9 AU. Recent Launches --------------- An Orbital Sciences Taurus 2110 failed to remain in orbit after launch from Vandenberg's pad 576E on Sep 21. A problem a few seconds after first stage separation caused the T6 rocket to go off course; the rocket recovered and the remainder of the stages fired, but velocity appears to have been just too low to reach a sustainable orbit. Launch was at 1849 UTC on Sep 21; the Castor 120 first stage (or Stage 0 in Orbital's nomenclature) burn lasted about 83 seconds, and after its separation the Orion 50S motor ignited - it was at this point that things went awry. The Orion 50S separated at 1851 UTC and was followed by the Orion 50 motor burn. The three Orion motors used in Taurus' upper stages are the same motors used in the Pegasus rocket. At 1857 UTC the Orion 38 final stage separated from the lower stages; at this stage it was intended to burn from a -3000 x 465 km x 97 deg orbit to a circular 476 x 482 km x 97 deg orbit. A 150m/s velocity shortfall would be enough to leave the payloads with a negative perigee. At 1900 UTC the Orbview-4 satellite separated from the top of the Aft Payload Capsule (APC). At 1902 UTC the APC top half separated; it had been covering the QuikTOMS and SBD. At 1903 UTC the QuikTOMS separated from the SBD satellite, which remained attached to the final stage. At about 1902 UTC all these objects crossed the equator at an altitude of around 427 km, heading south. I generated some test element sets and find that to avoid crashing in Antarctica, perigee must have been more than -50 km; if perigee was more than 80-90 km, the satellites would probably have survived for a few orbits. Impact would have been between 1930 and 1945 UTC, in a region from the S Indian Ocean stretching up to the sea east of Kenya, depending on the perigee, from 45-60E and between 60S and 10S. If the NASA statement that impact was NE of Madagascar is correct, perigee must be toward the upper end of the range and so I'm guessing an orbit of around 75-80 km x 425-430 km x 97 deg was achieved. The primary payload on T6 was the OrbView-4 imaging satellite. OrbView-4, built by Orbital, was a 368 kg box-shaped satellite carrying a 1-m resolution panchromatic camera and an 8-m resolution 200-channel hyperspectral imager with a 0.45-meter aperture. It was to be used by the US Air Force. The second payload was the QuikTOMS satellite (and would it really have been so hard to spell Quick correctly?), a NASA-GSFC project carrying the TOMS-5 ozone mapper. QuikTOMS was a 168 kg double Microstar and replaced TOMS instruments on a delayed Russian weather satellite and the failed ADEOS. The loss of QuikTOMS may put a hole in NASA's attempts to monitor the ozone layer. The third payload was SBD, the Orbital Special Bus Design. The 73 kg satellite was a test version of an enlarged Microstar bus. It would have remained attached to the third stage, together with two Celestis burial canisters containing cremated human remains, and an experimental third stage avionics box. All previous Taurus launches were successful; all launches have been from pad 576E at Vandenberg. There are two main variants of Taurus flown to date, one with the first stage of the Peacekeeper missile, and one with its Castor 120 commercial equivalent. Taurus Date Variant Stage 0 type Payload T1 1994 Mar 13 1110 MX USAF STEP M0 T2 1998 Feb 20 2210 Castor 120 GFO/Orbcomm T3 1998 Oct 3 1110 MX NRO STEX T4 1999 Dec 21 2110 Castor 120 KOMPSAT/ACRIMSAT T5 2000 Mar 12 1110 MX USAF/DoE MTI T6 2001 Sep 21 2110 Castor 120 OV-4/QuikTOMS/SBD The Lockheed Martin Athena-1, scheduled for launch from Kodiak Island, also uses the Castor 120 first stage. Arianespace launched an Ariane 44P from Kourou on Sep 25. Ariane V144 placed the Atlantic Bird 2 satelite in geostationary transfer orbit. Atlantic Bird 2 is an Alcatel/Cannes Spacebus 3000B2 Ku-band communications satellite owned by the European consortium Eutelsat. It will replace the Telecom 2A satellite at 8 deg W and provide TV broadcast, telecom and data services for Europe and for transatlantic links. AB-2 has a dry mass of 1368 kg and a launch mass of 3150 kg. AB-1, built by Alenia, has not yet been launched. Table of Recent Launches ----------------------- Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Aug 6 0728 DSP 21 Titan 4B/IUS Canaveral SLC40 Early Warn 33A Aug 8 1613 Genesis Delta 7326 Canaveral SLC17A Space probe 34A Aug 10 2110 Discovery ) Shuttle Kennedy LC39 Spaceship 35A Leonardo ) Aug 20 1830 Simplesat - Discovery, LEO Astronomy 35B Aug 21 0924 Progress M-45 Soyuz-U Baykonur LC1 Cargo 36A Aug 24 2034 Kosmos-2379 Proton-K/DM2M? Baykonur LC81R Early Warn? 37A Aug 29 0700 VEP-2 ) H-2A Tanegashima Technology 38B LRE ) Geodesy 38A Aug 30 0646 Intelsat 902 Ariane 44L Kourou ELA2 C/Ku telecom 39A Sep 7 1939 Picosat 7/8 - Sindri, LEO Technology 00-42C Sep 8 1525 USA 160 Atlas IIAS Vandenberg SLC3E Sigint 40A Sep 14 2335 Pirs ) Soyuz-U Baykonur LC1 Station module Progress M-SO1 ) Cargo 41A Sep 21 1849 Orbview-4 ) Taurus 2110 Vandenberg 576E Imaging F01 QuikTOMS ) Environment F01 SBD ) Technology F01 Celestis-4 ) Burial F01 Sep 25 2321 Atlantic Bird 2 Ariane 44P Kourou ELA2 Ku telecom 42A Current Shuttle Processing Status _________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission Launch Due OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 3 STS-109 2002 Jan 17 HST SM-3B OV-103 Discovery OPF Bay 2 Maintenance OV-104 Atlantis VAB STS-110 2002 Feb 28 ISS 8A OV-105 Endeavour OPF Bay 1 STS-108 2001 Nov 29 ISS UF-1 .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for | | | Astrophysics | | | 60 Garden St, MS6 | | | Cambridge MA 02138 | inter : jcm@cfa.harvard.edu | | USA | jmcdowell@cfa.harvard.edu | | | | JSR: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~jcm/space/jsr/jsr.html | | Back issues: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~jcm/space/jsr/back | | Subscribe/unsub: mail majordomo@head-cfa.harvard.edu, (un)subscribe jsr | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'