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Aviation History
1991
1991 - 3350.PDF
SPACEFLIGHT First stage of Energia test engine explodes BY TIM FURN1SS The first-stage engine of an Energia heavy-lift booster exploded in November during a static-engine firing at a test site in Krutaya Gorka, 55km from Omsk, Russia. Nikolai Shpynov, chief radiol ogist at Omsk, says one of the four cryogenic liquid-oxygen/ liquid-hydrogen RD0120 en gines suffered a cracked propellant line. The resulting explosion produced a "huge or ange cloud", which deposited oily fluid over the nearby area. Four RD0120 engines power the core stage of Energia, which is augmented by four strap-on boosters. The boosters also form the first stage of the Zenit me dium-lift launcher, the last two of which exploded on launch. Energia has flown only twice, in 1987 and 19888, the last time carrying unmanned Soviet shut tle Buran on its mission. Military funding for the Buran pro gramme has ceased, says spokes man Boris Belitsky, although a mission is still being planned. • No 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 Date 7 Nov 12 Nov 20 Nov 22 Nov 24 Nov 27 Nov 28 Nov November launch log Spacecraft Lacrosse/KH12? Cosmos 2165-70 Cosmos 2171 Cosmos 2172 Atlantis/DSP Cosmos 2173 OMSP 2-06 Type Recon Mil comms Recon Data relay Early warning Navsat Mil metsat Launcher Titan 4 Tsyklon Soyuz Proton Shuttle Cosmos Atlas Launch site \&ndenberg Plesetsk Plesetsk Baikonur KSC Plesetsk tadenberg Dornier to build Biobox incubator The European Space Agency has awarded Dornier, a member of the Deutsche Aero space space systems group, a DM7 million ($4,450,000) con tract to build Biobox, a bio logical-experiments module to be flown for the first time on the Soviet Bion 10 space mission scheduled for November 1992. Earth observation mission clouded by rising pollution Frederick Gregory and Story Musgrave, the veteran astro nauts of the STS44 Atlantis mis sion, which returned to Earth on 1 December after cutting short a planned ten-day reconnaisance and Earth observation mission, have reported that visibility from orbit is worsening. Atmospheric pollution and thickening layers of haze have damaged the view, making it more difficult to see the surface than on previous flights, espe cially with the Sun at low angles in the sky. Cloud cover at the time of the Atlantis flight also hampered a series of reconnaisance observa tions by mission specialist Mario Runco and payload specialist Thomas Hennen. Runco says that he missed 15 targets because of cloud cover ing the Earth, although during one of 17 successful target ob servations he was able to spot crates on an oil tanker. Runco says that the simple optics used during his and Hen- nen's observations had only mar ginal military use and that more powerful instruments would have to be used in the future. Hennen, a trained intelligence Pollution is thickening the atmosphere officer with the US Army, ob served 11 good targets, but lost 21 because of bad weather and the early landing. The planned experiment by the Strategic Defence Initiative Office (SDIO), to observe Shut tle thruster firings using the Low-power Atmospheric Com pensation Experiment (LACE) satellite, could not be conducted because of the premature ending of the STS44 mission, although several missions planned for 1992 will be observed by the LACE spacecraft. • "Shuttle glow", an orange- coloured phenomenon envelop ing the orbiter's tailplane surfaces to a distance of about 10cm, which has been observed and photographed by astronauts during missions, is caused by a chemical reaction between ni tric-oxide molecules on the spacecraft's skin and fast-moving oxygen atoms in the Earth's upper atmosphere, NASA has revealed. The reaction creates an ener getic form of the gas, nitrogen dioxide, which becomes lumi nous. The inadvertent discovery was made during SD10 ob servations during the STS39 mission earlier this year. • Biobox is a fully automatic incubator which can provide temperature profiles between 4°C and 37°C. During the ten- day Bion 10 mission aboard a recoverable Photon capsule, Dutch, Belgian and French sci entists hope to investigate the development and differentiation of living osteocytes and bone formation and degradation under microgravity conditions. Biobox may be flown on fu ture Soviet missions as well as on the Space shuttle. • Ariane boosted by Thailandsat 1 lift Arianespace has won its tenth launch contract of 1991, to carry Thailandsat 1 into orbit in early 1994 aboard an Ariane 4. The contract, to launch one of the two satellites being built by Hughes, is the 35th outstanding launch commitment for Ariane space, representing a value of $2.7. billion. The company was contracted to launch Japan's Su- perbird just days earlier. Thailandsat will be the first satellite to be launched as a Spelda Dedicated Satellite pay- load. The It HS376 spacecraft, with ten C-band and two Ku- band transponders, will be placed beneath a much larger payload within the Spelda launch system, making the most use of the space available inside the payload fairing, which would otherwise not be used during a single payload launch. • Ariane V48, with Telecom 2A and Inmarsat 2-F3,. was launched on 17 December from Kourou in French Guiana on the eighth commercial mission for Arianespace this year. The booster was a 44L, the most powerful of the fleet. • 14 FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL 25 December, 1991 - 7 January, 1992
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