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Aviation History
1975
1975 - 1214.PDF
Soyuz 18 flight to overlap ASTP Alexei Leonov, the commander of the Soyuz craft which will take part in next week's ASTP mission, revealed on June 26 that the crew of Soyuz 18, Lt Col Piotr Klimuk and engineer Vitali Sevastianov, will remain aboard the Salyut 4 space station throughout the duration of the international flight. Tass had earlier declined to give any indication of the proposed length of the flight, and it had been widely surmised that the mission would go to 40-50 days and then be terminated in order to give maximum publicity to the American/Russian flight. However, the Soyuz 18 mission now appears likely to last about 60 days, with a return to Earth set for a few days after the end of the joint mission (which is scheduled to begin on July 15 and to end, for the Russians, on July 21). Salyut 4 will be flying in nearly the same orbital inclination, but 100 miles higher than the ASTP craft. It will be the first time that three manned spacecraft have been in flight together around the Earth. Leonov said that the Soyuz 18 crew would be communicating with their colleagues aboard the Russian ASTP craft, though the two missions are not in any way related to one another. However, it is possible that a rendezvous may be attempted after the ASTP task has been completed. Soyuz 18 had on June 23 beaten the 29 days 13hr 20min Soviet duration record set by the first cosmonauts to visit the space station earlier this year. If a 60-day mission is in prospect, Soyuz 18 may turn out to be the second longest manned space flight, the record being currently Soyuz I8/Salyut 4 crew Klimuk, left, and Sevastianov aboard the space station. Note the data sheets secured to the left-hand wall, and the pedals of the roof-mounted exercise machine behind Sevastianov FLIGHT International, lOluly I97S held by the 84-day Skylab 4 mission which began in Novem ber 1973. Possibly as a prelude to ASTP, unusual publicity has been accorded to Soyuz 18. Almost nightly television sessions have shown the crew at work and leisure and both are clearly in excellent health. Great emphasis has been placed on regular use of the bicycle-type exercise machine in an effort to retain muscle tone following Sevastianov's unpleasant experiences when re-adapting to gravity after the 18-day Soyuz 9 mission in 1970. Dr G. Narimanov, Deputy Director of the Institute of Space Research in Moscow, has emphasised the importance of the medical, biological, technical and scientific experi ments being carried out by the crew. Tests have also been made of a new attitude-stabilisation system capable of more precise long-term pointing. This is necessary not only to take advantage of the inherent accuracies of many of the experiments, but also to cut down the wasteful use of fuel by control equipment of coarse resolution. VENUS 9 AND 10 MISSIONS The two Soviet spacecraft Venus 9 and 10, launched respec tively on June 8 and June 14, are now both well on their way towards Earth's sister planet. Boris Petrov, who chairs the Soviet Council for International Co-operation, notes that they will land on Venus, though he did not indicate whether a soft- or hard-landing was contemplated. The probes each weigh 10,2001b and were launched by three-stage SL-13 Proton boosters, the first time that this vehicle has been used for Venus missions, though it was first employed in July 1965. The craft were placed on their trajectories from parking orbits around the Earth with the assistance of kick stages. The two previous probes, Venus 7 and 8 (which sent soft-landing capsules to the surface in 1970 and 1972 re spectively), weighed about 2,6001b apiece. The lunar roving vehicles Lunas 16 and 20 and the soil-return Luno khods 1 and 2, previously the heaviest Soviet soft-landers, all weighed about 4,2001b each. The new Venus craft therefore represent a big jump in capability. It is not known whether the payloads comprise both orbiters and landers, or whether (as in the case of the four Mars probes launched in 1973) they each represent only one-half of a mission. Russia is known to be keen on exploring the surface of Venus and carrying out television surveys. The increase in capability may stem from new equipment to sense and direct the craft—if it is a lander—towards the elevated part of the surface in order to keep the temperature down, and also from the increased structural weight necessary to protect the payload from the inhospitable atmosphere. At ground level the atmosphere has a temperature esti mated at 590°C and a pressure of about 100 atmospheres; winds of about 240 m.p.h. are inferred from the measurements made by Nasa's fly-by Mariner 10 last year. A landing on an elevated part of the surface would con siderably reduce the temperatures and pressures. Both probes will reach the vicinity of Venus in mid- October. SPACELAB SIMULATION FLIGHT COMPLETED An international crew of five has completed a six-day Spacelab simulation aboard Galileo II, Nasa's Convair 990 airborne laboratory based at Ames Research Centre in California. The crew worked in the aircraft by day and lived in special quarters packed alongside when not flying. The mission manager, Louis Haughney of Ames, was joined by two Europeans and two Americans for the series of five night flights, which began on June 2 and concluded on June 7. Experiment operators included Nicholas Wells, a graduate student at Britain's University of Sussex. The six-day test, part of a study programme called Air borne Science/Spacelab Experiments System Simulation (ASSESS), was designed primarily as an examination of the problems- which will inevitably arise when project scientists are not at hand to tend their equipment. The instruments aboard Spacelab will generally be managed by operators and not by the project scientists themselves.
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