Jonathan's Space Report: 10th anniversary year No. 385 draft 1999 Jan 13 Cambridge, MA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shuttle and Station ------------------------ The next Shuttle launch is STS-93, which will deploy the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Columbia will be transferred to the Vehicle Assembly Building in early February; Chandra flies from TRW's Redondo Beach plant in California to Florida at the end of the month. Recent Launches --------------- A Krunichev Proton-K launch vehicle with an Energiya 11S861 DM-2 upper stage placed three Uragan navigation satellites in orbit for the Russian Ministry of Defence GLONASS system on Dec 30. The GLONASS satellites operate in 19000 km circular orbits and are analogous to the US Navstar GPS system; the Uragan spacecraft were designed by NPO PM of Zheleznogorsk and built by Polyot of Omsk. The three satellites are Uragan Nos. 86, 84 and 79 (GLONASS numbers 786, 784 and 779), and are in orbital plane 1, according to the KNITs web page. NASA's Mars Polar Lander was launched on Jan 3 at 2021 UTC by a Boeing Delta 7425 rocket. The first burn of the second stage placed it in a 157 x 245 km x 28.35 deg parking orbit. The second stage started again around 2055 UTC and was follwed by the burn of the Star 48B third stage. The third stage and MPL entered solar orbit, with third stage separation at around 2102 UTC. The second stage was left in a 226 x 740 km x 25.8 deg Earth orbit. MPL is part of the Mars Surveyor program. It consists of a cruise stage and a lander, built by Lockheed Martin Astronautics/Denver. Attached to the cruise stage are two Deep Space 2 Mars Microprobes, penetrator probes which will slam into the Martian surface a few hundred km away from the MPL landing site. DS2 is part of NASA's New Millenium Program. Both MPL and DS2 are managed by the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. The LP team tell me that the report of a drift in Lunar Prospector's inclination to 85 deg was a typo, and the actual orbit inclination remains close to 90.0 degrees. Following its propulsion problems, ISAS' Nozomi probe will remain in solar orbit until Dec 2003, entering Mars orbit four years late. Launch Logs ----------- I've updated the various launch logs in http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~jcm/space/log/ Several new launch times for early (1958-1962) Soviet satellites have been added from recent Russian publications. Also, the Kosmos-2285 satellite launched in Aug 1994, which I flagged as an unusual mission in JSR 206, is implicitly identified in a recent Russian book as Obzor No. 1, an experimental remote sensing satellite. Table of Recent Launches ----------------------- Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Dec 4 0835 Endeavour ) Shuttle Kennedy LC39A Spaceship 69A Unity ) Station 69F PMA-1 ) PMA-2 ) Dec 6 0043 Satmex 5 Ariane 42L Kourou ELA2 Comsat 70A Dec 6 0057 SWAS Pegasus XL Vandenberg Astronomy 71A Dec 10 1157 Nadezhda ) Kosmos-3M Plesetsk Navsat 72A Astrid-2 ) Science 72B Dec 11 1845 Mars Climate Orb. Delta 7425 Canaveral SLC17A Mars probe 73A Dec 14 0431 SAC-A Endeavour,LEO Science 69B Dec 15 0209 Mightysat Endeavour,LEO Technol. 69C Dec 19 1130 Iridium 88?) CZ-2C/SD Taiyuan Comsat 74A Iridium 89?) Comsat 74B Dec 22 0108 PAS 6B Ariane 42L Kourou ELA2 Comsat 75A Dec 24 2003 Kosmos-2361 Kosmos-3M Plesetsk Navsat 76A Dec 30 1835 Kosmos-2362 ) Proton-K/DM2 Baykonur Navsat 77A Kosmos-2363 ) Navsat 77B Kosmos-2364 ) Navsat 77C Jan 3 2021 Mars Polar Lander) Delta 7425 Canaveral SLC17B Mars probe 01A MPL Cruise Stage ) DS2 Microprobe 1 ) DS2 Microprobe 2 ) Current Shuttle Processing Status _________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission Launch Due OV-102 Columbia OPF Bay 3 STS-93 Apr 1999 OV-103 Discovery OPF Bay 1 STS-96 May 1999 OV-104 Atlantis VAB Bay 2 STS-101 Aug 1999 OV-105 Endeavour OPF Bay 2 STS-99 Sep 1999 MLP1/RSRM-69/ET-99 VAB Bay 1 STS-93 MLP2/ MLP3/ .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for | | | Astrophysics | | | 60 Garden St, MS6 | | | Cambridge MA 02138 | inter : jcm@cfa.harvard.edu | | USA | jmcdowell@cfa.harvard.edu | | | | JSR: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~jcm/space/jsr/jsr.html | | Back issues: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~jcm/space/jsr/back | | Subscribe/unsub: mail majordomo@head-cfa.harvard.edu, (un)subscribe jsr | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'