Nov 26 1988
From The Space Library
A Soyuz TM-7 spacecraft, carrying a joint Soviet-French crew, was successfully launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, for a month-long tour in the Mir space station. With French President Francois Mitterand in attendance, the three-man crew, which included French astronaut Jean-Loup Chretien, lifted off from Baikonur on the second French-Soviet crew-tended mission. Chretien had also been aboard the first joint mission in July 1983. The three-man Soyuz crew planned to join the two-man crew, aboard Mir since January, to perform a series of scientific experiments. Additionally, Chretien was scheduled to become the first West European to perform a spacewalk. (FBIS-Sov-88-228; SSR 1988 104A; NY Times, Nov 27/88; W Post, Nov 27/88; CSM, Nov 28/88)
After 23 years in solar orbit, Pioneer 6, the oldest operating spacecraft, returned to the vicinity of its launch. The craft passed within 1.16 million miles of the Earth, roughly five times the distance between the Earth and its Moon. This distance was the closest Pioneer 6 had ever approached Earth since launch from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Florida in 1965. With only five lunar distances separating them, Earth's gravitational pull was strong enough to haul the craft toward its own orbit, thereby increasing time in orbit for Pioneer 6 by six days (from 311 to 317 days) and 6 million miles.
The spacecraft was designed to study the Sun's atmosphere, the heliosphere. After 23 years, two of Pioneer 6's original instruments were still transmitting information on the turbulence of the solar wind to scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California. Three sister probes followed Pioneer 6 into solar orbit. During the period from 1966 to 1970, Pioneers 7, 8, and 9 were launched into coordinated orbits. With Pioneer 6, this spacecraft team formed a network of solar weather stations monitoring the heliosphere, triangulating information back to Earth from the far side of the Sun, and increasing understanding of solar effects on Earth's magnetic field. (SSR 1965 105A; ARC Release 88-81)
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