Jonathan's Space Report May 4, 1989 (no. 14) The space shuttle Atlantis was launched at 18:47:00 GMT today on the STS-30 mission. At 22:30 GMT the mission was proceeding nominally and Magellan deployment was scheduled for 01:04 GMT. The Progress-41 ferry seems to have run into trouble after undocking from Mir on Apr 20. Instead of being deorbited, according to NORAD tracking it ended up in a 124x390 km orbit. It then slowly decayed, reentering at 1202 GMT on Apr 25 from an orbit with a perigee of 94 km. This could indicate an engine underburn, possibly due to lack of fuel after the unplanned boost of the Mir station to a storage orbit. The Foton-2 materials processing flight was orbited on Apr 26 from Plesetsk. Based on the Vostok craft, the satellite will remain in orbit for several weeks and land in the USSR. Kosmos-2018, launched on Apr 20, is a GRU recon satellite, for high resolution imaging. It will probably operate until late June. Another old weather satellite, Kosmos-206, reentered on Apr 22 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (c) 1989 Jonathan McDowell, all rights reserved ---------------------------------------------------------------------------