Jonathan's Space Report No. 142 1993 Feb 3 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ STS-55 ------ Columbia was moved today from Orbiter Processing Facility Bay 2 to Vehicle Assembly Building Bay 3 and mated to the ET/SRB stack. The mail STS-55 payload is Spacelab D-2. A small secondary payload was to have been the BREMSAT microsatellite which was to have been deployed from a GAS (Getaway Special) canister. However, the failure of the similar ODERACS deployment in December is still not understood, so the BREMSAT has been removed from Columbia and will fly on a later mission. Launch of STS-55 is expected on Feb 25. Mir --- Aleksandr Solov'yov and Sergey Avdeev undocked from the Mir complex aboard Soyuz TM-15 on Feb 1 and landed the same day in Kazakhstan after six months in space. The Soyuz TM-16 crew, Manakov and Polishchuk, remain in orbit aboard the station. The Progress TM-15 cargo ferry will undock soon to perform the Znamya solar sail experiment. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Launches -------- Kosmos-2232 is a missile early warning satellite. It was launched from Plesetsk on Jan 26. Probably built by NPO-PM of Krasnoyarsk, the satellite is operated by the Russian Air Defense Forces (Voyska PVO). It is in an elliptical 63 degree, 12 hour orbit. Large numbers of debris fragments have been detected in orbit associated with the Kosmos-2227 satellite, launched on Dec 25. Either the satellite or, more likely, its Zenit upper stage rocket, has disintegrated. Date Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Jan 12 1100? Kosmos-2230 Kosmos R-14 Plesetsk Navsat 01A Jan 13 0155? Molniya-1 Molniya Plesetsk Comsat 02A Jan 13 1359 Endeavour STS-54 Kennedy Spaceship 03A Jan 13 2012 TDRS 6 IUS STS-54,LEO Comsat 03B Jan 19 1455? Kosmos-2231 Soyuz Plesetsk Recon 04A Jan 24 0557 Soyuz TM-16 Soyuz Baykonur Spaceship 05A Jan 26 1425? Kosmos-2232 Molniya Plesetsk Early Warn 06A Reentries --------- Jan 10 0416 Kosmos-2229 Landed in Kazakhstan Jan 18 Kosmos-2220 Landed in Kazakhstan? Jan 19 1338 Endeavour Landed at Kennedy Space Center Feb 1 Soyuz TM-15 Landed in Kazakhstan Current Shuttle Processing Status ____________________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission OV-102 Columbia VAB Bay 3 STS-55 OV-103 Discovery OPF Bay 3 STS-56 OV-104 Atlantis Palmdale OMDP OV-105 Endeavour OPF Bay 1 STS-57 ML/SRB/ET/OV stacks ML1/STS-56 VAB Bay 1 ML2/ ML3/STS-55/ET/OV-102 VAB Bay 3 .-----------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for | | | Astrophysics | | | 60 Garden St, MS4 | | | Cambridge MA 02138 | inter : mcdowell@cfa.harvard.edu | | USA | | '-----------------------------------------------------------------------------'