Jonathan's Space Report No. 303 1996 Nov 7 Cambridge, MA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shuttle and Mir --------------- Launch of STS-80 has been delayed while NASA figures out how the solid motor nozzle insulation got eroded on the last flight. Recent Launches --------------- The SAC-B and HETE satellites were launched on Nov 4, but failed to separate from the launch vehicle final stage because the third stage battery failed. The satellites were launched by an Orbital Sciences Corp. Pegasus XL rocket. The L-1011 carrier plane took off from Wallops Island, Virginia and dropped the Pegasus about 160 km out over the Atlantic Ocean. All three stages fired successfully and delivered the vehicle to the correct 95.07 min, 487 x 555 km x 38.0 deg orbit. SAC-B is an experimental satellite for the Argentine space agency CONAE with solar flare and gamma ray burst instruments. It also carries CUBIC, a Penn State experiment to survey the X-ray sky. HETE is an MIT-led NASA satellite to localize gamma ray bursts. HETE is carried inside the Dual Payload Attach Fixture on which SAC-B is mounted, so it's trapped and was unable to deploy its solar panels. The satellite is now defunct. SAC-B was able to deploy its solar panels, but the tumbling spacecraft was unable to remain in sunlight enough to recharge the batteries and it appears that SAC-B too is now lost, having operated for about 10 hours. Mars Global Surveyor, NASA's probe to map the Martian surface and the first of three Mars probes due for launch this window, was launched at 1700 UTC on Nov 7. The McDonnell Douglas Delta 7925 launch vehicle took off from Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 17, with nine GEM solid motors attached to the Thor-derived first stage. First stage separation was four minutes into the flight, and the Delta second stage then ignited. The second stage uses an AJ-10-118 engine and a structure derived from the old Ablestar rockets used to launch the early Transits (see last issue). The second stage cut off at 9 minutes into the flight, placing MGS into a 185 x 185 km x 28.5 deg orbit. At 1741 UTC the second stage ignited again for two minutes, and the vehicle entered a 173 x 4720 km x 28.5 deg orbit. The spin table on the second stage then began to rotate at 60 rpm, spinning up the third stage and payload to stabilized them. At 1744 the second stage separated and half a minute later the Thiokol Star 48 solid motor on the PAM-D third stage ignited to enter an escape trajectory. At 1752 the third stage deployed `yo-yo' masses on long wires to carry away the angular momentum and spin down the vehicle, and then separated from the MGS probe which is now en route to Mars. Meanwhile, the second stage was due to fire again to get rid of all extra fuel and prevent it exploding later (this was a problem with Delta stages in the 1970s). MGS was built by Lockheed Martin Astronautics/Denver and is operated by the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. The MGS instruments are the Mars Orbiter Camera, the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, the Electron Reflectometer, the Thermal Emission Spectrometer, the Mars Relay radio system, and a magnetometer system. The Mars Relay system will be used to relay data from future Mars landers to Earth. MGS also carries a bipropellant liquid propulsion system, I believe related to the Cassini design but using a British Leros 1b engine. MGS will reach Mars orbit in Sep 1997 and use aerobraking to lower its initial elliptical orbit to a 450 km polar mapping orbit by Jan 1998. Galileo made a close flyby of Callisto on Nov 4 at 1334 UTC at a distance of 1118 km, and reached perijove on orbit 3 two days later. Next orbit it will fly by Europa, on Dec 19. The FSW-2 Chinese recon satellite returned its recovery vehicle safely to China on Nov 4. Erratum: Delete the reference to APL satellite VE-4 in last issue's table. Replace it with 5E-5, launched 1964 Dec 13. Table of Recent Launches ------------------------ Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL. DES. Sep 4 0901 Kosmos-2333 Zenit-2 Baykonur LC45L Sigint 51A Sep 5 1247 Kosmos-2334 ) Kosmos-3M Plesetsk LC132/1 Navsat 52A UNAMSat ) 52B Sep 6 1737 Inmarsat III F2 Proton Baykonur LC81 Comsat 53A Sep 8 2149 GE-1 Atlas IIA Canaveral LC36B Comsat 54A Sep 11 0000 Echostar II Ariane 42P Kourou ELA2 Comsat 55A Sep 12 0849 Navstar 30 Delta 7925 Canaveral LC17A Navsat 56A Sep 16 0855 Atlantis Shuttle Kennedy LC39A Spaceship 57A Sep 26 1751 Ekspress Proton-K Baykonur Comsat 58A Oct 20 0730? FSW-2 Chang Zheng 2D Jiuquan Remote sen. 59A Oct 24 1137 Molniya-3 Molniya-M Plesetsk Comsat 60A Nov 4 1709 SAC-B/HETE Pegasus XL Wallops Science 61A Nov 7 1700 MGS Delta 7925 Canaveral LC17A Mars probe Current Shuttle Processing Status ____________________________________________ Orbiters Location Mission Launch Due OV-102 Columbia LC39B STS-80 Nov OV-103 Discovery OPF Bay 2 STS-82 Feb 13 OV-104 Atlantis OPF Bay 3 STS-81 Jan 12 OV-105 Endeavour Palmdale OMDP ML/SRB/ET/OV stacks ML1/ ML2/RSRM-54 VAB Bay 1 STS-81 ML3/RSRM-49/ET-80/OV-102 LC39B STS-80 .-------------------------------------------------------------------------. | Jonathan McDowell | phone : (617) 495-7176 | | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for | | | Astrophysics | | | 60 Garden St, MS6 | | | Cambridge MA 02138 | inter : jcm@urania.harvard.edu | | USA | jmcdowell@cfa.harvard.edu | | | | JSR: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/QEDT/jcm/space/jsr/jsr.html | | Back issues: ftp://sao-ftp.harvard.edu/pub/jcm/space/news/news.* | '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'