SB SAREX @ AMSAT $STS-79.012
STS-79 SAREX Bulletin Number 12

Silver Spring, Maryland  USA
September 20, 1996 @ 2000 UTC

The first full day of joint Shuttle/Mir operations began in earnest
overnight with the transfer of a biotechnology investigation and
logistical supplies from Atlantis to Mir.

Atlantis Commander Bill Readdy and Mir Commander Valery Korzun continued
to oversee the transfer of water containers and supplies from the
shuttle's Spacehab module into Mir.  More than 4,000 pounds of equipment
and logistical supplies will be transferred to Mir, and some 2,000
pounds of experiment samples and equipment will be moved from Mir to
Atlantis for return to Earth.

Atlantis' astronauts were awakened to begin their fifth flight day on
orbit at 0154 UTC this morning and began their scheduled sleep period
at 1754 UTC today.

Because there are no packet radio operations on STS-79, SAREX ops
are limited to crew wake periods.  Here are the crew wake times over
the weekend and some mission milestones from the NASA TV SCHEDULE,
REV B, edited:

ORBIT  EVENT                UTC DAY & DATE          MET        UTC

----------------------- Thursday, September 19 ------------------------
45     ATLANTIS/MIR DOCKING                       02/18:19    03:13
------------------------- Friday, September 20 ------------------------
70     CREW SLEEP                                 04/09:00    17:54
----------------------- Saturday, September 21 ------------------------
75     CREW WAKE UP                               04/17:00    01:54
86     CREW SLEEP                                 05/09:00    17:54
------------------------- Sunday, September 22 ------------------------
91     CREW WAKE UP                               05/17:00    01:54
101    CREW SLEEP                                 06/09:00    17:54
------------------------- Monday, September 23 ------------------------
106    CREW WAKE UP                               06/17:00    01:54
117    CREW SLEEP                                 07/09:00    17:54
121    CREW WAKE UP                               07/15:00    23:54
------------------------ Tuesday, September 26 ------------------------
122    ATLANTIS UNDOCKING                         07/16:37    01:31
123    ATLANTIS SEPARATION BURN                   07/18:22    03:16
...
----------------------- Thursday, September 26 ------------------------
160    KSC LANDING                        KSC     10/03:18    12:12


The orbit of Mir-Atlantis is expected to be very stable until undocking,
after which a new set of orbital elements will be generated for Atlantis.

Here are the latest keplerian elements from Gil Carman, WA5NOM, at the
NASA Johnson Space Center:

STS-79
1 24324U 96057A   96264.65773942  .00002754  00000-0  34584-4 0  9156
2 24324  51.6533   2.9982 0007271 192.6891 167.4084 15.62005142   694

Satellite: STS-79
Catalog number: 24324
Epoch time:      96264.65773942   =     yrday.fracday
Element set:     915
Inclination:       51.6533 deg
RA of node:         2.9982 deg
Eccentricity:     .0007271
Arg of perigee:   192.6891 deg
Mean anomaly:     167.4084 deg
Mean motion:   15.62005142 rev/day
Decay rate:    2.75400E-05 rev/day^2
Epoch rev:              69
Checksum:              320

[Radio amateurs are encouraged to relay these SAREX messages to
their local packet BBS as long as the Bulletin IDentification (BID)
is preserved.  The BID is the character string beginning with the
dollar sign ($), for example as in "SB SAREX @ AMSAT $STS-79.012"
without the quotation marks.]

Submitted by Pat Kilroy, WD8LAQ for Frank H. Bauer, KA3HDO and the
SAREX Working Group.

/EX


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Patrick L. Kilroy                  Phone:   301-286-5910
Engineer (in motion)               Fax:     301-286-1695
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center   E-mail:  pat.kilroy@gsfc.nasa.gov
Building 6, Code 311               WWW URL: http://arioch.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Greenbelt, Maryland  20771                  310/310.html
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