Jonathan's Space Report Mar 2 1991 (no.66) ---------------------------------------------------- The flight of STS-39/Discovery has been delayed. Discovery will be rolled back for repairs, while the STS-37/Atlantis flight (Gamma Ray Observatory deploy) remains scheduled for early April. The latest Ariane launch has been delayed till early March. Viktor Afanas'ev and Musa Manarov continue in orbit aboard the Mir/Kvant/Kvant-2/Kristall/Soyuz TM-11/Progress M-6 complex. They will return in early May, and are to be replaced by the Soyuz TM-12 crew, Anatoliy Artsebarskiy, Sergey Krikalyov and Helen Sharman. Ms. Sharman, a British citizen, is flying an 8 day mission as part of the Juno project financed by the Moscow National Bank, and will return with the TM-11 crew. The Salyut-7/Kosmos-1686 space station complex reentered over Argentina on Feb 7. The Kosmos-2123 navigation satellite also carries the RS-12 and RS-13 amateur radio transponder packages. Kosmos-2124 was launched Feb 7 by Soyuz from Plesetsk; it is an imaging recon satellite and is expected to remain in orbit until early April. Eight small 'lightsats' carrying military communications transponders were launched from Feb 12 from Plesetsk on a single Kosmos R-14 launch vehicle; they were assigned the names Kosmos-2125 through Kosmos-2132. A Proton vehicle launched Kosmos-2133, a Soviet geostationary communications satellite on Feb 14. A Soyuz launch vehicle orbited Kosmos-2134, an advanced imaging recon satellite from Baykonur on Feb 15. Another navigation satellite, Kosmos-2135, went into orbit on Feb 26. This is the fourth Kosmos R-14 launch vehicle to be used in a month; R-14 launches often occur in groups like this. The 80th Molniya-1 satellite was launched into elliptical 12-hour orbit on Feb 15; it is used for Soviet government communications. ___________________________________ |Current STS status: | |Orbiters | | | |OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 1 | |OV-103 Discovery LC39A | |OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 2 | | | |ML/ET/SRB stacks | | | |ML1/STS-37/ET VAB Bay 1 | |ML2/STS-39/ET/OV-103 LC39A | |ML3/STS-40 VAB Bay 3 | ----------------------------------- (c) 1991 Jonathan McDowell. Information in this report is obtained from public sources and does not reflect the official views of NASA. .-----------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (205)544-7724 | | Space Science Lab ES65 | uucp: | | NASA Marshall Space Flight Center | bitnet : | | Huntsville AL 35812 | inter : mcdowell@xanth.msfc.nasa.gov | | USA | span : ssl::mcdowell | '-----------------------------------------------------------------------------'