Jonathan's Space Report

No 747 2018 Apr 3 Somerville, MA

International Space Station

Expedition 55 is underway with Anton Shkaplerov in command, Scott Tingle and Norishige Kanai as the initial flight engineers On Mar 21 Soyuz MS-08 was launched with Oleg Artemev, Ricky Arnold and Drew Feustel It docked with the Poisk module at 1940 UTC Mar 23 and the three arrivals joined the Ex55 crew as flight engineers

Cargo ship Progress MS-07 undocked from the Pirs module at 1350 UTC on Mar 28 At about 1520 UTC on Mar 29 it raised apogee, maneuvering to a 407 x 436 km orbit Around 1315 UTC on Apr 2 another burn lowered perigee, leaving it in a 384 x 436 km orbit

On Mar 28 the Japanese JRMS robot arm was used to move the broken CATS atmosphere observatory from one location to another on the JEM External Facility; a reboot attempt failed, confirming the problem is CATS itself and not the electrical socket

On Mar 29 astronauts Feustel and Arnold, in suits 3006 and 3003, made spacewalk ISS US EVA-49 from the Quest module They depressurized the airlock at 1325 UTC and opened the hatch at 1329 UTC The astronauts added radio antennas to the Tranquility module and replaced the ETVCG camera set on P1 truss camera port CP8 The hatch was closed at 1938 UTC and the airlock was repressurized at 1943 UTC

On Apr 2 the Dragon CRS-14 cargo delivery mission was launched The Falcon 9 first stage was B1039, on its second flight It made a ballistic flight and tested ocean terminal maneuvers, but no recovery attempt was made The second stage was, as always, a new stage It placed Dragon in orbit and then made a deorbit burn to reenter over the Southern Ocean The CRS-14 Dragon is the 16th Dragon mission It used capsule 110, which flew previously on CRS-8, together with a new nosecap and a new trunk section

In the CRS-14 trunk were three payloads - MISSE-FF, ASIM and PFCS

MISSE-FF, owned by private company Astra LLC, will be placed at ELC-2 Site 3 to host sample containers which expose various materials to space to see if they are good candidates to be used in building future satellites Mass may be around 435 kg

ASIM is the ESA Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor, for studying upper-atmosphere electrical discharges It will go to the Columbus EPF and has a mass of 314 kg

PFCS is the Pump Flow Control System, a component of the Station's cooling system It will be stored as a spare part outside the station, Mass of a PFCS unit is about 111 kg; this may not include the storage adapter which is probably another 50 kg

In CRS-14's cabin is the 100 kg RemoveDebris payload from Surrey Satellite It will be deployed from the ISS Kibo module and test technologies for active debris removal RemoveDebris carries two 2U cubesat subsatellites which it will eject It will attack one of them with a net and stalk the other one with sensors It also will put a target card on a 1 5-metre boom and prang it with a tethered harpoon The idea of RemoveDebris is to test tech for getting rid of space junk The net around the cubesat will act as a drag sail to speed up the satellite's reentry The RemoveDebris payload itself carries a DeOrbitSail system to increase drag The system was tested on a 2015 cubesat with partial success

ORBITUARY 1: TIANGONG-1

Tiangong-1 reentered 0016 UTC Apr 2 over the South Pacific at 164 3W 13 6S, between Samoa and Tonga

In the 1970s and 1980s China funded its space program at a low level, with only about one satellite launch a year In the 1990s they started a crash program to catch up with the US and Russia, ticking off each space first one by one: human-in-space, moon-probe, moon-lander, spacewalk, docking and so on The Shenzhou spaceship, carrying 2 to 3 astronauts, is similar to Soyuz; the Tiangong spacelab is like Russia's 1971 Salyut-1 spacelab, and the associated program replicates both Russia's Salyut-1/Salyut-4 and NASA's Gemini missions

Tiangong-1 was launched in 2011 and hosted two astronaut crews in 2012 and 2013 China should then have deorbited it under control over the South Pacific But they were worried that if the 2016 launch of Tiangong-2 failed, their program would be stalled So, they decided to keep Tiangong-1 in orbit beyond its design life, in hibernation as a backup for Tiangong-2 In the event, the Tiangong-2 launch went just fine but Tiangong-1 had by then broken down Since 2016 it has been inert, orbiting the Earth without any active control, its initial 364 x 382 km orbit inclined 42 8 deg to the equator slowly decaying

Tiangong-1's initial mass was 8500 kg, but propellant usage and usage of food and water by the crews had reduced this to at most 7500 kg according to my calculations Although most spacecraft of this mass are nowadays usually not allowed to make uncontrolled reentries, since 1957 there have in fact been 48 such uncontrolled reentries of objects more massive than it The most recent was in January 2018, involving an 8000 kg Russian rocket stage launched only a month earlier

By 0h UTC on Apr 1, the orbit of Tiangong-1 was 161 x 171 km (apogee and perigee relative to a fictional 6378 km radius sphere) By this stage atmospheric drag was quickly changing the orbital elements The US Air Force 18SPCS issued a number of updated TLE element sets during the day, based on fits to data obtained by a number of ground-based radars around the world The final such set had an epoch of 16h UTC and showed the orbit to be 144 5 x 152 3 km For comparison, the ISS orbits at 400 km

O3b

Arianespace launched a Soyuz/Fregat from the Centre Spatial Guyanais on Mar 9 with the fourth quartet of O3b communications satelllites for SES The O3b equatorial MEO constellation provides broadband internet for the 'other 3 billion' in the developing world

The Soyuz delivered the Fregat upper stage to an -1186 x 194 km x 5 3 deg trajectory The Fregat made multiple burns to 160 x 205 km, 190 x 7869 km, 7831 x 7835 km O3b FM14 and FM16 were deployed at 1911 UTC; FM13 and FM15 were deployed at 1932 UTC

GSAT-6A

On Mar 29 ISRO launched the GSAT-6A military communications satellite with its Mk II Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle, flight GSLV-08 with cryognenic upper stage CUS-09 After a successful orbit insertion to a 152 x 36509 km x 20 9 deg geotransfer orbit, GSAT-6A made its first apogee burn at 0552 UTC Mar 30, reaching 5028 x 36440 km x 12 0 deg However after a second, 53-min duration, apogee burn on Mar 31, ISRO lost contact with it On Apr 2 US tracking found it in a 25979 x 36368 km x 3 3 deg orbit, suggesting that the burn completed successfully, but as of this writing contact has not been regained

Kosmos-2525

On Mar 29 Russia launched the light Soyuz-2-1V rocket from Plesetsk Soyuz-2-1V is like a regular Soyuz but without the four large side strapon boosters On its three previous launches it was combined with a Volga upper stage, but this time the bare 1V configuration was flown The payload was the EMKA - 'Experimental Small Spacecraft', a small imaging satellite built by VNII Elektromekhaniki (VNIIEM) It was given the Kosmos-2525 cover name after being placed in a low 315 x 318 km sun-synchronous orbit

Beidou

Two more Beidou-3 navigation satellites were launched on Mar 29 This pair, Beidou-3 MEO-9 and MEO-10, used the design built by the Shanghai Engineering Center for Microsatellites They are number 30 and 31 in the overall constellation and use PRN code numbers C29 and C30

Iridium

SpaceX carried out its 5th Iridium-Next deployment mission on Mar 30 Ten satellites were deployed into initial orbits which will kater be raised by the satellites' own propulsion systems The Falcon 9 first stage, B1041, was not recovered The second stage deorbited itself on the first orbit

Gaofen

China launched three Gaofen-1 imaging satellites on Mar 31 GF-1-2, GF-1-3, and GF-1-4 will reportedly work with the GF-1-1 satellite launched in 2013 They were launched into the 1030LT sun-synchronous orbit plane originally home to GF-1-1; however GF-1-1's plane has now drifted to 1102 LT

Dead satellites from 2017 Soyuz/Fregat

On 2017 Jul 14 (as reported in JSR 740) a Soyuz/Fregat launch from Baykonur placed 73 payloads in orbit One payload, Flock 2k-42, appears not to have separated from the Fregat stage, while another, Lemur-2-ArtFisher, was ejected at the wrong time and ended up in the wrong orbit - a new flavor of launch failure In addition, nine of the payloads never responded to their ground controllers after deployment: the nine appear to be Landmapper-BC1 and BC2 (Astro Digital), CICERO-1, 2 and 3 (GeoOptics), Iskra-MAI-85 (Moscow Av Inst ), Ekvador-UTE-YuzGU (YuzGU, SW State Univ), and MKA-N-1 and 2 (Roskosmos) The satellites were all mounted in the same area of the launch vehicle According to an article by Debra Werner in Space News (Mar 9) the satellite owners and insurers believe, despite denials by the launch service marketer, that these satellites were damaged because a Fregat thruster malfunctioned and sprayed hydrazine over the payloads, with another thruster plume possibly causing the hydrazine to ignite The satellites were, in this account, dead before ejection This is a new one on me, although perhaps can be grouped with cases where residual thrust from an upper stage caused damaging recontact with an ejected payload, or where problems with the acoustic environment inside a fairing caused payload damage I consider that in a successful launch there is an at least implicit responsibility of the launch provider not to toast the payloads during ascent Apply the rules I set out in JSR 669 for 'payload failed to separate' and weighting for the fact that 62 of the 73 payloads were delivered correctly, I reduce this launch's success rating from 100 percent to 89 percent

Rocket stage disposal

Recently I've found the idea to be widespread that most upper stages are actively deorbited rather than left in space to make an eventual uncontrolled reentry Let's look at the actual data, sorted by launch provider and disposal method

In some cases multiple upper stages can achieve orbit, for example an insertion stage left in parking orbit and a final stage left in the delivery orbit Delta rockets used to do this - stage 2 in LEO, stage 3 in GTO - and Soyuz/Fregat sometimes does it today More common nowadays is for the 'parking orbit' to be marginally suborbital, with what would have been the insertion stage making most of an orbit before reentry, and only the upper stage getting to orbit Examples include the Ariane 5 core stage, the Shuttle external tank, and the ISRO PSLV stage 3 I'll include these marginally-suborbital stages because, compared to practice in the 1970s, they reflect a design change to avoid uncontrolled stage reentry I distinguish stages left in LEO to reenter uncontrolled, left in low-perigee high-apogee transfer orbits from which uncontrolled reentry may happen in a few years, and left in high orbits where they will remain for centuries or longer These methods of stage disposal are mostly considered 'safe', but do contribute to the overall space junk population The worst debris risk is from stages left in the higher LEO orbits; even those that reenter quickly present a ground impact risk, however small In 2017, 42 percent of the stages launched performed controlled entries to pre-planned target zones This compares with 12 percent in 2000 and 11 percent in 1970

Rocket stages in orbit 2017: controlled reentry or not?

   Marginal      Deorbited    Left in LEO      Left in high orbit   Total  
   Suborb                      to reenter       (GTO, MEO, GEO)
                                               LowPeri HighPeri

[USA] ULA 0 7 0 0 1 8
SpX 0 11 0 7 0 18
OATK 0 0 4 0 0 4

[Europe] Arianespace 11 3 0 6 2 22

[Russia] Khru + ILS 4 0 1 0 4 9 S7 0 0 1 0 1 2
Roskosmos 0 1 7 0 0 8
VVKO 2 1 2 0 2 7

[China] CALT 0 0 5 5 1 11
SBA 0 3 2 0 0 5
EXPACE 0 0 1 0 0 1
CASIC 0 0 1 0 0 1

[Other] MHI 0 0 2 4 0 6
ISRO 3 0 2 3 0 8

Total 20 26 28 25 11 110

ORBITUARY 2: GRACE-1

The GRACE 1 satellite reentered on March 10, ending the GRACE mission that began in 2002 The identical GRACE 1 and 2 satellites, built by Astrium/Bremen, were operated by the GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam for the German space agency DLR and by JPL and UT Austin for NASA They were launched together on a Rokot from Plesetsk into a 450 x 466 km x 89 deg orbit, which decayed to around 300 km by late 2017 The satellites flew in the same orbit about 200 km apart, measuring slight changes in acceleration over space and time due to uneven distribution of mass on the Earth, sensitive enough to detect changes in ocean currents, ice sheets and aquifers The GRACE science mission ended on 2017 Oct 27, with a battery failure on GRACE 2 GRACE 2 reentered on Dec 24 GRACE 1 continued transmitting until Dec 13, by when it had run out of propellant and had been passivated (Thanks to JPL for this latter info ) A similar dual-satellite mission, GRAIL, carried out analogous gravity mapping of the Moon

Two GRACE-FO follow on satellites are being prepared for launch

Table of Recent Orbital Launches

Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission INTL Catalog Perigee Apogee Incl Notes Feb 1 0207 Kanopus V-3 ) Soyuz-2-1A/Fregat Vostochniy Imaging 14A S43180 500 x 511 x 97 5 2323LT Kanopus V-4 ) Imaging 14B S43181 500 x 510 x 97 5 2323LT S-NET 1 ) Comms 14 S43182? 571 x 589 x 97 7 S-NET 2 ) Comms 14 S43183? 571 x 589 x 97 7 S-NET 3 ) Comms 14 S43184? 571 x 589 x 97 7 S-NET 4 ) Comms 14 S43185? 571 x 589 x 97 7 Lemur-2-Kadi ) AIS/Weather 14 S43186? 570? x 590?x 97 7? Lemur-2-TheNickMolo ) AIS/Weather 14 S43187? 570? x 590?x 97 7? Lemur-2-Jin-Luen ) AIS/Weather 14 S43188? 570? x 590?x 97 7? Lemur-2-UramChanSol ) AIS/Weather 14 S43189? 570? x 590?x 97 7? D-Star One Phoenix ) Tech 14 S43190? 570? x 590?x 97 7? Feb 2 0751 Zhang Heng 1 ) Chang Zheng 2D Jiuquan Science 15A S43192 489 x 509 x 97 3 1411LT Ada ) Imaging 15 S43193? 493 x 504 x 97 2 Maryam ) Imaging 15 S43194? 488 x 508 x 97 3 Ulloriaq ) AIS/Imaging 15 S43195? 486 x 508 x 97 3 GOMX-4B ) Tech 15 S43196? 483 x 507 x 97,3 Shaonian Xing ) Tech 15 S43197? 483 x 507 x 97,3 FengMaNiu 1 ) Tech 15 S43199? 485 x 507 x 97 3 Feb 3 0503 Tasuki SS-520 Uchinoura Comms 16A S43201 186 x 2012 x 30 9 Feb 6 2045 Elon's Roadster Falcon Heavy Kennedy LC39A Test 17A S43205 717 x-79898 x 28 9 Feb 12 0503 Beidou DW28 ) Chang Zheng 3B/YZ1 Xichang LC2 Navigation 18A S43207 21464 x 22170 x 55 0 Beidou DW29 ) Navigation 18B S43208 21539 x 22191 x 55 0 Feb 13 0813 Progress MS-08 Soyuz-2-1A Baykonur LC31 Cargo 19A S43211 189 x 223 x 51 6 Feb 22 1417 PAZ ) Falcon 9 Vandenberg SLC4E Radar 20A S43215 501 x 518 x 97 5 0600LT SSO Tintin A ) Comms 20B S43216 500 x 517 x 97 5 0600LT SSO Tintin B ) Comms 20C S43217 500 x 517 x 97 5 0600LT SSO Feb 27 0434 JSE K-6 H-IIA 202 Tanegashima Imaging 21A S43223 500?x 500?x 97 5? Mar 1 2202 GOES 17 Atlas V 541 Canaveral SLC41 Weather 22A S43226 8241 x 35286 x 9 5
Mar 6 0533 Hispasat 30W-6 ) Falcon 9 Canaveral SLC40 Comms 23A S43228 287 x 22255 x 27 0 PODSAT ) Tech 23B S43229 188 x 22250 x 27 0 Mar 9 1710 O3b FM13 ) Soyuz-2-1B/Fregat CSG ELS Comms 24D S43231 7830 x 7846 x 0 0 O3b FM14 ) Comms 24C S43232 7808 x 7848 x 0 0 O3b FM15 ) Comms 24A S43233 7825 x 7836 x 0 0 O3b FM16 ) Comms 24B S43234 7821 x 7835 x 0 0 Mar 17 0710 LKW 4 Chang Zheng 2D Jiuquan Pad 603 Imaging 25A S43236 490 x 503 x 97 3 1330LT SSO Mar 21 1744 Soyuz MS-08 Soyuz-FG Baykonur LC1 Spaceship 26A S43238 196 x 232 x 51 6 Mar 29 1126 GSAT-6A GSLV Mk II Satish Dhawan SLP Comms 27A S43241 5028 x 36440 x 12 0
Mar 29 1738 Kosmos-2525 Soyuz-2-1V Plesetsk Imaging 28A S43243 315 x 318 x 96 6 Mar 29 1756 Beidou DW 30 ) Chang Zheng 3B/YZ1 Xichang Nav 29A S43245 21537 x 22913 x 55 0 Beidow DW 31 ) Nav 29B S43245 21542 x 22192 x 55 0 Mar 30 1413 Iridium SV140 ) Falcon 9 Vandenberg SLC4E Comms 30D S43252 608 x 626 x 86 7 Iridium SV142 ) Comms 30J S43257 608 x 626 x 86 7 Iridium SV143 ) Comms 30K S43258 608 x 626 x 86 7 Iridium SV144 ) Comms 30G S43255 608 x 626 x 86 7 Iridium SV145 ) Comms 30E S43253 608 x 626 x 86 7 Iridium SV146 ) Comms 30F S43254 608 x 626 x 86 7 Iridium SV148 ) Comms 30A S43249 608 x 626 x 86 7 Iridium SV149 ) Comms 30B S43250 608 x 626 x 86 7 Iridium SV150 ) Comms 30H S43256 608 x 626 x 86 7 Iridium SV157 ) Comms 30C S43251 608 x 626 x 86 7 Mar 31 0322 Gaofen 1-02 ) Chang Zheng 4C Taiyuan LC9 Imaging 31A S43259? 639 x 643 x 98 0 Gaofen 1-03 ) Imaging 31B S43260? 638 x 642 x 98 0 Gaofen 1-04 ) Imaging 31C S43261? 638 x 642 x 98 0 Apr 2 2030 Dragon CRS-14 Falcon 9 Canaveral SLC40 Spaceship 32A S43267 204 x 357 x 51 6

Table of Recent Suborbital Launches

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

Jan 30 Burkan RV Burkan 2H Yemen Weapon 100? Riyadh Airport Feb 5 Target B-611? Jiuquan? Target 300? Urumqi? Feb 5 Interceptor DF-21 Urumqi? Interceptor 100? Intercept Feb 6 0300 Agni RV Agni I Kalam Island Test 300? Bay of Bengal
Feb 18 2330 Arrow KV Arrow 3 Palmachim Test 100? Mediterranean? Feb 20 0308 Agni RV Agni II Kalam Island Test 600? Indian Ocean Mar Dummy KV? Nudol' Plesetsk Test 100? Russia Mar 25 1051 NASA 46 019UO Terrier Im Mal Wallops I Education 172 Atlantic Mar 25 2025? Burkan RV Burkan 2H Yemen Weapon 100? Riyadh Airport Mar 27 0240? Trident RV x n? Trident II USS Nebraska, Pacific Test 1000? Kwajalein? Mar 27 0240? Trident RV x n? Trident II USS Nebraska, Pacific Test 1000? Kwajalein?

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