Jonathan's Space Report

No 667 2012 Sep 17 Somerville, MA USA

International Space Station

On Sep 12 the Japanese HTV-3 cargo ship was unberthed by the SSRMS arm at about 1202 UTC and released into space at 1550 UTC After one of HTV-3's onboard computers failed, a planned small separation burn was replaced by a much larger abort burn which safely and rapidly separated HTV-3 from the vicinity of the ISS HTV-3 was successfully deorbited over the Pacific on Sep 14

On Sep 16 at 2309 UTC Soyuz TMA-04M undocked from Poisk carrying Expedition 32 crew Gennadiy Padalka, Sergey Revin and Joe Acaba, marking the beginning of ISS Expedition 33 under the command of NASA's Capt Sunita Lyn Williams, USN, with crewmembers Flight Engineer-4 Yuriy Malenchenko (Roskosmos) and Flight Engineer-6 Akihiko Hoshide (JAXA)

According to Wikipedia (I haven't managed to confirm this from other sources) the full original name of Ohio-born Capt Williams was Sunita Pandya Krishna; her father's surname is Pandya so the Krishna should be considered a suffix Williams' first flight was on STS-116/Expedition 14-15; she is the second woman to command a space station, following Peggy Whitson

Soyuz TMA-04M flew for 2h 47 min in a 403 x 426 km orbit, and then at 0156 UTC on Sep 17 fired its deorbit engine to enter a 13 x 425 km entry orbit The three Soyuz modules separated at 0225 UTC At around 0230 UTC the BO and PAO (orbital and service modules) burnt up in the atmosphere as the SA (descent module) performed a controlled entry The spacecraft landed in Kazakhstan at 0235 UTC

SPOT 6

On Sep 9 India launched PSLV-C21 from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on Sriharikota Island into a 640 x 647 km x 98 2 deg, 10:00LT sun-synchronous polar orbit The main payload was the 712 kg SPOT 6 Earth observing satellite built by Astrium/Toulouse for Astrium subsidiary Spot Image (Toulouse) Earlier SPOT satellites were owned by CNES with Spot Image marketing the data

A secondary payload, the 15 kg PROITERES, was also deployed PROITERES (Project of Osaka Inst of Technology Electric Rocket Engine aboard small Spaceship) carries a pulsed plasma thruster experiment

NROL-36

On Sep 13 United Launch Alliance flew a Lockheed Martin Atlas V 401, serial AV-033, from Vandenberg Air Force Base The main payload is thought to be a pair of Navy signals intelligence satellites deployed in a 1010 x 1200 km x 63 4 deg orbit after the second Centaur burn (The primary satellite is USA 238; the secondary satellite has not yet been cataloged and may not have separated yet) This series of satellites is thought to be the modern successor to NRL's GRAB/POPPY/PARCAE satellites, first launched in 1960

The Centaur then made two further burns to 470 x 780 km x 64 7 deg The Centaur second stage carries the OUTSat secondary payload which ejected 11 small 'cubesats,' for a mixture of US military and university customers Of particular interest is CXBN, a Morehead State U experiment to produce an all-sky 30-50 keV hard X-ray cosmic diffuse emission map The two US Army sats in the SMDC-ONE (Operational Nanosatellite Effect) program are variously numbered 1 1/1 2 and 2 1/2 2 in different sources

The OUTSat structure is the NPSCUl launcher developed by the US Naval Postgraduate School It contains 8 P-POD cubesat deployers which ejected the individual cubesats, a mixture of 1U (0 1m cube), 2U (0 1 x 0 1 x 0 2m box) and 3U (0 1 x 0 1 x 0 3m box) payloads, as follows:

Pod 1 3U SMDC-ONE 1 2 (US Army Space and Missile Defence Command, Huntsville, Alabama) Comms Pod 3 3U Aeneas (U Southern California, Los Angeles and Dept of Homeland Security) Cargo container tracking Pod 4 3U CSSWE (U Colorado, Boulder) Colorado Student Space Weather Expt Radiation belt electrons and protons Pod 5 1U CP5 (Cal Poly State U , San Luis Obispo) Solar sail deorbit technology 2U CXBN (Morehead State U , Morehead, Kentucky) Cosmic Hard X-ray background Pod 6 3U CINEMA 1 (U Cal Berkeley) Magentospheric studies Pod 7 3U Re (Lawrence Livermore Natl Lab, California) Space debris tracking Pod 8 3U SMDC-ONE 1 1 (US Army Space and Missile Defence Command, Huntsville, Alabama) Comms Pod 2 1U Aerocube 4 (Aerospace Corp , El Segundo, California) 1U Aerocube 4A (Aerospace Corp , El Segundo, California) 1U Aerocube 4B (Aerospace Corp , El Segundo, California)

The payloads were ejected in the order Pod 1,3,4,5,6,7,8,2 I believe the OUTSat remained attached to the Centaur; whether you count it as an attached secondary payload or a non-payload piece of hardware is a matter of taste, but I'll count it as a payload

Since their first flight in 2003, 102 Cubesats have been launched: 2 suborbital, 19 launch failures (4 exoatmospheric), and 81 orbital Of these, 60 are still in orbit This includes two attached pairs, M-Cubed/E1PU2 and STARS-1, and five cubesats currently aboard the Kibo module which should be deployed later this month

Errata

Thanks to the editor of the German translation of JSR for spotting the typo in Sunita Williams' surname in the last few issues Amazing how many times one can look at an error and not spot it A reminder to my loyal readers that they are encouraged to point out to me typos and mistakes of all kinds

Armstrong and Aldrin landed just 20 seconds before they would have been told to abort due to low fuel readings However, Henry Spencer points out that it later turned out they had 63 5 seconds of hover time remaining

And of course, Jim Lovell was Capt USN (Ret ), not USAF - apologies for that cut-and-paste error

Suborbital flights

A US Army/Orbital Juno target missile was launched from Fort Wingate to White Sands on Sep 13; the Juno is similar to the old Hera and like it has an SR19 motor topped with an M57A1 motor, both old Minuteman stages NASA launched a Terrier Lynx from Wallops on Sep 11 on a military mission but neither the flight number nor the DoD customer has been identified Previous Terrier Lynx flights have been for the Naval Air Warfare Center and the Missile Defense Agency

Table of Recent (orbital) Launches

Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL
DES Aug 1 1935 Progress M-16M Soyuz-U Baykonur LC1 Cargo 42A Aug 2 2054 Intelsat IS-20 ) Ariane 5ECA Kourou ELA3 Comms 43A Hylas 2 ) Comms 43B Aug 6 1931 Telkom-3 ) Proton-M/Briz-M Baykonur LC81/24 Comms 44A Ekspress MD2) Comms 44B Aug 19 0655 Intelsat IS-21 Zenit-3SL SL Odyssey, Pacific Comms 45A Aug 20 1829 Sfera-53 - ISS, LEO Sci 98-067CM Aug 30 0805 RBSP A ) Atlas V 401 Canaveral SLC41 Sci 46A RBSP B ) Sci 46B Sep 9 0423 SPOT 6 ) PSLV-CA Sriharikota LP1 Imaging 47A PROITERES ) Tech 47B Sep 13 2139 USA 238? ) Atlas V 401 Vandenberg SLC3E Sigint 48A OUTSat ) Tech 48N SMDC-ONE 1 2 ) Comms 48B Aeneas ) Comms 48C CSSWE ) Sci 48D CXBN ) XR Astron 48E CP5 ) Tech 48F CINEMA 1 ) Sci 48G Re/STARE ) Tracking 48H SMDC-ONE 1 1 ) Comms 48J Aerocube-4 ) Tech? 48M Aerocube-4 5A ) Tech? 48K Aerocube-4 5B ) Tech? 48L USA 238 P/L 2?) Sigint 48

Table of Recent (suborbital) Launches

Date UT Payload/Flt Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission Apogee/km

Aug 7 0730 S-310-41 S-310 Uchinoura Reentry test 150 Aug 9 0316 Agni RV Agni II Chandipur Test 220? Sep 12 Radar target? Terrier Lynx Wallops Island Target? 300? Sep 13 1230 Patriot Target Juno Fort Wingate Target 100?

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