STS-129 Space Shuttle Atlantis ended its eleven-day mission at the International Space Station on November 27, 2009, at 9:44 AM EST. Atlantis landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Archive for 2009
On November 23, 2009, at 1:55 AM EST, an Atlas V launch vehicle lifted off from Space Launch Complex 41 carrying the commercial satellite Intelsat-14. Intelsat-14 is a geosynchronous communications satellite that will be located at 45 degrees W longitude.
On November 21, 2009, during the six hours and eight minutes of the EVA #2, Michael Foreman and Randolph Bresnik installed the Grappling Adaptor to On-Orbit Railing bracket to the Columbus laboratory, an additional ham radio antenna and an antenna for wireless helmet video camera, and they relocated the Floating Potential Measurement Unit.
EVA #1 lasted six hours and thirty-seven minutes on November 19, 2009, from 14:24 UTC to 21:01 UTC. Michael Foreman and Robert Satcher were the spacewalkers during this EVA.
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| Credits: The British Interplanetary Society |
Carnival of Space #129 is hosted by Tracy Zollinger Turner at Tiny Mantras.
The blog posts cover topics like the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Rosetta spacecraft, Olympus Mons, Neptune’s dark spot, water ice found by LCROSS, the Leonid meteor shower, Project Icarus, microsatellites designed and built at the University of Kentucky, and much more.
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| Credits: ESA – S. Corvaja, 2009 |
Arianespace is getting closer to the first Soyuz launch from Kourou, in French Guyana.
On November 7, 2009, two Soyuz launchers were loaded on MN Colibri, which transports them from Russia to French Guyana. The journey of the two Soyuz 2-1A launchers from St. Petersburg to Kourou takes two weeks.
Each launch vehicle is loaded in ten containers, which hold the four first-stage strap-on boosters, the Block A core stage, the Block I third stage, the Fregat upper stage, and the Soyuz 2-1A ST-type payload fairing. MN Colibri is also carrying the refined kerosene propellant used by the boosters, the Block A and Block I stages, as well as the unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) and the nitrogen peroxide (N2O4) needed to fuel the Fregat upper stage.
The Soyuz launch site at Kourou is in its final stage of construction. While sharing common features with the cosmodromes at Baikonur in Kazakhstan and Plesetsk in Russia, the launch site at Kourou will have a fifty-two meter tall mobile gantry, which will be used for vertical payload integration and final pre-liftoff processing.
If you ask yourself how safe is Soyuz, it has been in production since 1957, continuously upgraded, and has more than 1,740 successful launches on record to date. Soyuz will become the medium-size launcher in the Arianespace family of launch vehicles. Taking advantage of the low latitude of the European spaceport, Soyuz will be able to deliver three-ton payloads to geostationary orbits.
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