Jonathan's Space Report No. 239 1995 May 4 Cambridge, MA -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A quiet week... Shuttle ------- Atlantis was rolled out to pad 39A on Apr 26 for mission STS-71; Discovery was rolled from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building on May 3 and mated to the external tank and solid boosters for mission STS-70 the same day. It has now been decided to fly Discovery before Atlantis. Discovery will carry a TDRS communications satellite into orbit. Mir --- Launch of the GFZ-1 satellite from Mir, described in the last issue, was at 1912 UT on Apr 19. Recent Launches -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Erratum: The ERS-2 launch time was 0144 UT, not 1344 UT; I misunderstood the information provided by Arianespace's PAO. Contact with the Clementine space probe in solar orbit has now been fully regained. Not enough fuel remains for an asteroid encounter, so a burn was due to be made last week to slow the probe's drift away from Earth to maximize communications time. Geostationary satellite movements --------------------------------- Here are the positions of the satellites launched so far this year: Intelsat 704 66.0E UHF F/O F4 177.9W Himawari 5 159.7E Intelsat 705 56.2W Brasilsat B2 60.8W Hot Bird 1 12.5E AMSC-1 101.8W drifting 0.1E/day Table of Recent Launches ------------------------ Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Apr 3 1348 Orbcomm 1 ) Pegasus L1011 VAFB/PAWA Comsat 17A Orbcomm 2 ) Comsat 17B Microlab 1 ) Science 17C Apr 5 1116 'Ofeq-3 Shaviyt Palamchim Technol. 18A Apr 7 2347 AMSC-1 Atlas IIA Canaveral LC36A Comsat 19A Apr 9 1934 Progress M-27 Soyuz-U Baykonur LC1 Cargo 20A Apr 19 1912 GFZ-1 - Mir Geodesy 8617JE Apr 21 0144 ERS-2 Ariane 40 Kourou ELA2 Rem Sensing 21A Reentries --------- Apr 3 Kosmos-2137 Reentered Apr 4 Kosmos-2290 Deorbited over Pacific Current Shuttle Processing Status ____________________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission Launch Due OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 3 STS-73 Sep 21 OV-103 Discovery LC39B STS-70 Jun 8 OV-104 Atlantis LC39A STS-71 Jun 19-24? Under review OV-105 Endeavour OPF Bay 1 STS-69 Jul 20 ML/SRB/ET/OV stacks ML1/ ML2/RSRM-44/ET-71/OV-103 LC39B STS-70 ML3/RSRM-45/ET-70/OV-104 LC39A STS-71 .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for | | | Astrophysics | | | 60 Garden St, MS4 | | | Cambridge MA 02138 | inter : jcm@urania.harvard.edu | | USA | jmcdowell@cfa.harvard.edu | | | | JSR: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/QEDT/jcm/jsr.html | ! ftp://sao-ftp.harvard.edu/pub/jcm/space/news/news.* | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'