Oct 14 1976
From The Space Library
NASA launched Marisat 3, third and last in a series of Comsat General maritime communications satellites, from ETR at 6:44 pm EDT on a Delta into a synchronous transfer orbit. At seventh apogee 8:11 pm EDT 16 Oct., the apogee boost motor was fired to maneuver the satellite to a position at 36 000 km, altitude above the equator at about 182°E; final move to operation location at 73°E above the Indian Ocean would take place in Nov.
The spin-stabilized active-repeater spacecraft, weighing about 700 kg in orbit, was a cylinder with a diameter of about 2 m and an overall length of 3.65 m. Built by Hughes Aircraft Corp., the comsat would act as a relay station to transmit and receive information between ships and submarines at sea and shore stations. It would join Marisat 1, operating at 15°W over the Atlantic Ocean since Feb. 1976, and Marisat 2, operating at 176.5°E over the Pacific since June. (The Marisat 3 mission was judged successful 3 Nov. 1976; the Marisat 2 mission [see 9 June] had been judged successful 6 Oct. 1976.) (NASA Release 76-156; MOR M-492-205-76-03 [prelaunch] 6 Oct 76, [postlaunch] 5 Nov. 76; W Star, 15 Oct 76, A-5; MOR M-492-205-76-02, 14 Oct 76)
Marshall Space Flight Center announced scheduling of further tests in October for prototype cloud-physics experiment hardware to be flown on the Space Shuttle to help researchers understand microphysical processes occurring in the atmosphere. The experiments would develop techniques for accurate prediction and control of weather (increase of snowfall or rain, dissipation of fog, suppression of lightning) to improve man's environment. The Atmospheric Cloud Physics Laboratory (ACPL) being developed by MSFC would use the low or zero gravity during Shuttle/Spacelab flights to perform experiments without contamination by supporting devices-wires, spider webs, blasts of air or electrical fields-used for test objects in earth laboratories. The prototype equipment was being tested in weightless periods provided by parabolic flights in the Johnson Space Center's zero-gravity test aircraft. 0. H. Vaughn of the Aerospace Environment Div., Space Science Laboratory at MSFC, had been monitoring performance of the equipment during flights that began in September. (MSFC Release 76-186)
Ruth Bates Harris, NASA's deputy assistant administrator for community and human relations, announced that she would leave the agency effective 15 Oct. Mrs. Harris said she would return to New York "to attend to pressing personal family needs," but would "spend an number of months continuing to work as a consultant" to NASA, in order to complete some unfinished community and human relations projects. She had been a deputy assistant administrator since Aug. 1974, the first woman to reach that position in NASA, and had earlier been the first director of NASA's Office of Equal Employment Opportunity. Before joining NASA, Mrs. Harris had been director of human relations for the public schools in Montgomery County, Md., and had been director of the Human Relations Commission in Washington, D.C. She had received more than 50 awards and citations for her work in human relations. (NASA Release 76-170)
The USSR launched a geophysical rocket, Vertikal 4, from an undisclosed site "in the medium latitudes" of European Russia to an altitude of 1512 km. Carrying "more than 10 complex and diverse scientific instruments" developed and built by specialists from Bulgaria, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR, the rocket was designed to sample a vertical cross section of the neutral upper atmosphere and ionospheric plasma in a 15-min time period. In a Pravda interview, Academician B. N. Petrov noted that composition of the atmosphere and ionosphere changed with height, the lighter gases being at the top. None of the previous Vertikal rockets (launched in 1970, 1971, and 1975) had reached altitudes of more than about 500 km, the oxygen section of the ionosphere. Vertikal 4 had reached the hydrogen region, or protonosphere, and had measured properties of the plasma affecting radio-wave absorption and investigated effects of shortwave solar radiation on the earth's atmosphere. Results of the investigation would extend knowledge of weather and climate, Petrov said. (FBIS, Tass in English, 14 Oct 76; Pravda in Russian, 17 Oct 76; Moscow Domestic Service in Russian, 29 Oct 76)
14-18 October: The USSR launched Soyuz 23 carrying two cosmonauts, Lt. Col. Vyacheslav Zudov as pilot and Lt. Col. Valery Rozhdestvensky as engineer, from the Baykonur cosmodrome near Tyuratam in Kazakhstan at 8:40 pm Moscow time (1;40 pm EDT) 14 Oct. to link up with the orbiting space station Salyut 5 and continue research begun there in July by the crew of Soyuz 21. The nighttime launch was replayed later on Soviet TV. Initial orbit parameters were 243-km perigee, 275-km apogee, 89.5-min period, and 51.6° inclination.
At what the NY Times described as "a restricted press conference before liftoff," the rookie cosmonauts said their mission was to concentrate on practical scientific uses of the Soviet space stations, especially extraterrestrial manufacture of metals, glass, and pharmaceuticals. Rozhdestvensky said that every ruble invested in space exploration had "already been returned tenfold to the national budget in one way or another. Tass announced at noon Moscow time on 16 Oct. (5 am EDT) that the docking of Soyuz 23 with Salyut 5 had been cancelled "because of the off'-design regime of [the] approach control system," and the crew had been ordered to return to earth. The NY Times noted that this was "the first occasion on which the Russians have made public their problems before the completion of a space flight." Usually no announcement had been forthcoming until the crew had returned to earth. At 8;46 pm Moscow time (1:46 pm EDT)-almost exactly 48 hr after liftoff-the descent module landed 195 km southwest of Tselinograd in Kazakhstan "on the surface of Lake Tengiz" in a heavy snowfall. The search and rescue teams, working under difficult nighttime conditions, recovered the descent module and the cosmonauts from the first splashdown in the 15-yr history of Soviet manned space flight. Announcement of the adverse conditions of the landing was not made until 12 hr afterwards, a delay suggesting some difficulty in locating the capsule. Lt. Gen. Vladimir Shatalov, director of cosmonaut training, said that helicopter and amphibious craft had aided the recovery. Residents of the nearby town of Arkalyk welcomed the returned cosmonauts at the airport and made them honorary citizens. The crew returned to the Baykonur cosmodrome by plane on the morning of 17 Oct.
The splashdown of Soyuz 23 resulted from chance rather than planning, said the newspaper Izvestia on 18 Oct., describing fears at recovery-team headquarters that the landing craft might have gone into swamps near the lake, after a report that the craft had tilted on impact, putting the porthole below the water's surface. The pilot of a plane had reported the capsule's position and a helicopter had towed the capsule to shore amid fog, snow, and broken ice. The official comments were regarded as "an effort to avoid blaming the astronauts for the mission's failure," said the NY Times.
The Soyuz 23 difficulty marked the fourth failure of a Soyuz mission to rendezvous; radar trouble had forced the crews of Soyuz 3, Soyuz 8, and Soyuz 15 to return to earth without docking. The Wash. Post noted that about one in three Soyuz flights had failed to carry out its mission: Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 resulted in the deaths of one and three cosmonauts respectively, and two cosmonauts on an unnumbered mission in April 1975 had been forced to abort their flight before reaching earth orbit. (NYT, 15 Oct 76, A 13; 16 Oct 76, 6; 17 Oct 76, 29; 18 Oct 76, 32; 19 Oct 76, 17; W Post, 15 Oct 76, A-21; 17 Oct 76, A-17; 1'8 Oct 76, A-16; C Trib, 15 Oct 76, 1-5; 17 Oct 76, 1-3; 18 Oct 76, 1-8; W Star, 17 Oct 76, A-14; FBIS, Tass in English, 14-17 Oct 76)
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