Jonathan's Space Report Feb 14 1991 (no.65) Space Report may continue to appear somewhat irregularly as I settle in to my new home in Huntsville. I hardly need to say that information appearing here is gathered from open sources and reflects my own interpretations; it is in no way anything official to do with NASA. ---------------------------------------------------- Viktor Afans'ev and Musa Manarov continue in orbit aboard the Mir/Kvant/Kvant-2/Kristall/Soyuz TM-11/Progress M-6 complex. The crew have performed three spacewalks so far. The first on Jan 7 repaired the EVA hatch on Kvant-2. The second and third on Jan 23 and Jan 26 set up a crane on the outside of the Mir core module which will be used in later spacewalks to transfer solar panels from the Kristall module to the Kvant module at the other end of the station. Orbiter Discovery, in the VAB, was mated to the STS-39 tank and boosters on Feb 11. Launch is due in early March. Atlantis and Columbia are in the Orbiter Processing Facility, and the boosters and tank for STS-37, the next Atlantis mission, have been mated in the VAB. Kosmos-2121, launched Jan 17, is a Vostok class recon satellite replacing Kosmos-2120 which landed the same day. Kosmos-2122, launched Jan 18, is an ocean surveillance satellite which tracks naval radio emissions. Informator-1 was launched Jan 29 by a Kosmos R-14 into a 1000 km polar (83 degree) orbit, the same orbit used by the Tsikada and Nadezhda navigation satellites. I think it's a position-locator satellite like Geostar, but my files are still in the moving truck somewhere in the Eastern US and I don't have access to Pravda or TASS at the moment (any volunteers?) Kosmos-2123 was launched Feb 5 by a Kosmos R-14. It appears to be a standard Soviet military Transit-equivalent navigation satellite, in a similar orbit to Informator-1. ___________________________________ |Current STS status: | |Orbiters | | | |OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 1 | |OV-103 Discovery VAB Bay 1 | |OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 2 | | | |ML/ET/SRB stacks | | | |ML1/STS-37/ET VAB Bay 3 | |ML2/STS-39/ET/OV-103 VAB Bay 1 | ----------------------------------- (c) 1991 Jonathan McDowell .-----------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (205)544-???? | | Space Science Lab ES65 | uucp: | | NASA Marshall Space Flight Center | bitnet : | | Huntsville AL 35812 | inter : mcdowell@xanth.msfc.nasa.gov | | USA | span : ssl::mcdowell | '-----------------------------------------------------------------------------'