Oct 25 1976
From The Space Library
The failure of Soyuz 23 to rendezvous with Salyut 5 indicated that the USSR was still encountering the technical and procedural problems that had beset its manned space program for the past 15 yr, said Aviation Wk & Space Technology magazine. The failure was the seventh in 11 attempts to complete various space-station missions and the second in a row for Salyut; the unplanned water landing that concluded the failed mission was the first in Soviet space history, but was attributed to "nothing more than bad luck," said Av Wk. The rendezvous-system failure was the fourth Soyuz mission plagued by procedural errors or hardware malfunctions associated with docking: Soyuz 3 failed to dock with Soyuz 2 in 1968, Soyuz 8 failed to dock with Soyuz 7 in 1969, and Soyuz 15 had been unable to rendezvous and dock with Salyut 3 in 1974. Because the failure of a system on the Soyuz 23 ended its mission rather than any problem with Salyut 5, Western observers wondered how soon the Soviets would attempt to reman the space station, which Av Wk referred to as "military." (Av Wk, 25 Oct 76, 23)
Viking 2's lander dug a soil sample from beneath a rock on Mars and delivered it to the biological instrument package. All three experiments received a part of the sample; initial data from two of them-the labeled release and the pyrolytic-release experiments-were sent to mission control at JPL. The third (gas-exchange) experiment was in a long incubation period that would continue through solar conjunction-a movement of the bodies which would put the sun between Mars and the earth preventing communication with the Viking landers and orbiters. Conjunction would begin about 10 Nov. and continue through early Dec.; if the landers were revived ;successfully after the communications gap, more samples would be collected in mid-Jan. Leonard Clark, surface sampler engineer, foresaw no problem in reactivating the arm mechanisms, adding that they had worked very well, "just the way they did during ground testing on earth before they left the manufacturer." (Av Wk, 1 Nov 76, 15)
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