Salyut 7
| Salyut 7 | |
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| Construction of Salyut 7 | |
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| Mission dates | |
| Mission title: | Salyut 7 |
| First name: | Salyut 7 |
| Begin: | April 19, 1982 19:45:00 UTC Baikonur , USSR |
| Re-entry: | February 7, 1991 |
| NSSDC ID: | 1982-033A |
| Crews: | 5 long-term crews 5 short-term stays |
| Inhabited : | 816 days |
| In orbit: | 3216 days |
| Number of orbits: | 51,917 |
| Apogee: | 278 km |
| Perigee: | 219 km |
| Rotation time: | 89.2 min |
| Inclination | 51.6 ° |
| Traveled route: |
2,106,297,129 km |
| Total mass: | 19,000 kg |
Salyut 7 ( Russian Салют-7 ) was the last space station of the Salyut program of the Soviet Union , which was put into low earth orbit . It was launched on April 19, 1982 with a Proton launcher from Baikonur . Salyut 7 was part of the transition from monolithic to modular space stations and served as a test object for many docking experiments and station expansion modules. It was the tenth space station launched.
description
Salyut 7 served as a fallback solution in the event of a failure of Salyut 6 and for this reason had a similar structure and equipment. However, when the Mir program was delayed, the former alternative solution was launched as an independent space station. The station suffered a number of technical breakdowns in orbit, but these were rectified by the respective crews. Salyut 7 had more cargo space than its predecessor models. The station was flown to by numerous Soyuz spaceships and supplied with food and other utensils during the long-term stays by unmanned Progress transport spaceships. In May 1982, for the first time in history, a satellite was launched from a space station - the Iskra 2 amateur radio satellite . In September 1983, a defective fuel line made an outboard operation necessary for the repair. The work was successfully done by the Soyuz T-10 crew . In addition to the numerous experiments and observations on Salyut 7, the station was used for docking maneuvers of large station modules. These modules were called "Heavy Cosmic Modules". They were modified variants of the TKS spaceship , which were intended for the stopped military space station program Alma . These maneuvers helped engineers develop the proximity and coupling technologies required to build the Mir space station. Salyut 7 entered the earth's atmosphere on February 7, 1991 and partially burned up. Fragments of the station fell in Argentina over the town of Capitán Bermúdez after the station shot past the intended reentry point over uninhabited area of the Pacific . People were not harmed in the crash.
Just like Salyut 6, Salyut 7 also had a docking adapter at each end . This made it possible for a manned Soyuz spaceship to dock at the station on one side and for Progress spaceships to fly to and supply the station at the same time from the other side. Salyut 7 had three solar panels , two of which were along the length of the station and one of which was perpendicular to the two on the station. These panels had the advantage that additional secondary panels could be attached to their sides in order to increase the electrical output. Inside Salyut 7 there were seven electric stoves , a refrigerator , a tank with permanently warm water and newly developed seats for the command console. The portholes were designed in such a way that they also let through ultraviolet light in order to quickly kill any germs that might be infected. Furthermore, the possibilities for the physical training of the cosmonauts on board were improved, so that even longer stays were possible on Salyut 7. The BST-1M telescope used on Salyut 6 has been replaced by an X-ray detector .
After the flight from Kosmos 1267 to Salyut 6, the Soviet Union launched Kosmos 1443 on March 2, 1983 with a Proton rocket. Kosmos 1443 docked at the station on March 10th. The module was undocked from the station by the Soyuz T-9 crew. The Kosmos landing capsule in 1443 transported equipment that was no longer needed back to Earth. The rest of the module burned up in the earth's atmosphere . The Kosmos 1686 module was launched on September 27, 1985 and reached Salyut 7 on October 2. Kosmos 1686 did not have a landing capsule and remained docked at Salyut 7 until the station went down. The module was used by the crew of Soyuz T-14 .
Crews
During the period of four years and two months, the station was visited by a total of ten teams. These included five permanent crews who were on Salyut 7 for a long-term stay and five teams who were doing a short-term stay. These crews included cosmonauts from France and India as part of the Interkosmos program. On Salyut 7, Svetlana Zavitskaya , the second woman in space , was the first woman to complete an external mission .
The following long-term crews worked on Salyut 7:
- The first crew, Anatoly Berezovoy and Valentin Lebedev , reached Salyut 7 on May 13, 1982 aboard the Soyuz T-5 and remained on the station for 211 days until December 10, 1982.
- On June 27, 1983, the Soyuz T-9 crew , Vladimir Lyachov and Alexander Alexandrow , reached Salyut 7 and stayed at the station for 150 days until November 23, 1983.
- On February 8, 1984, the crew of Soyuz T-10 , Leonid Kisim , Wladimir Solowjew and Oleg Atkow , reached Salyut 7 and stayed on Salyut 7 the longest with 237 days until October 2, 1984.
- On June 6, 1985, the crew of Soyuz T-13 , Vladimir Janibekov and Viktor Savinych , reached Salyut 7. After the arrival of Soyuz T-14 on September 18, 1985, Janibekov was replaced as commander by Vladimir Vasyutin , while Alexander Volkov as an additional The flight engineer came across the long-term crew. Georgi Grechko , the third crew member of Soyuz T-14, left the station just eight days later and returned to earth with Janibekov. On November 21, 1985, 168 days after Soyuz T-13 took off, Savinykh, Vasyutin, and Volkov returned home early due to Vasyutin's illness.
- On May 6, 1986 the crew of Soyuz T-15 , Leonid Kisim and Vladimir Soloviev , reached Salyut 7. The Soyuz spacecraft took off from the Mir space station to Salyut 7. After a fifty-day stay on Salyut 7, the crew of Soyuz T returned -15 with the Soyuz spaceship back to the Mir space station and took various scientific material with me. These were the only flights ever carried out between two space stations.
There were also five shorter missions to Salyut 7. These brought working materials, equipment and food to the long-term crews. The list of manned missions to the Salyut 7 space station gives an overview of all flights to Salyut 7.
Failure and reactivation
During an unmanned phase, the ground crew registered on February 11, 1985 that the electronic fuse in the circuit of the primary radio transmitter had triggered. Shortly afterwards, the secondary transmitter activated as intended and the connection was re-established. That was not a serious problem in itself, as the transmitter had already exceeded its planned service life, the failure did not come unexpectedly and a replacement module was already on board the station. The incident was documented and, as usual in such cases, it was recommended that the specialists for the power supply and the transmitter module be consulted for diagnosis.
However, the shift management of the following shift decided to try to put the primary transmitter back into operation without waiting for the specialists' assessment. After the control command to reactivate, there was a snowball effect, which finally led to the shutdown of the power supply for the entire S-190 module responsible for long-range radio . Both transmitters, receivers and the decoders were therefore out of order. Control commands could therefore no longer be received.
Basically, the station could have continued to function, but there was another problem with monitoring the state of charge of the on-board batteries. Due to a fault in the overcharge protection sensor on one of the seven batteries connected in parallel, regular automatic charging by the solar panels was prevented. This error could have been detected and corrected from the ground, but the radio link had already failed. Eventually the energy supply was exhausted and the entire electrical system switched off, especially the heating. After a few days, the station was below zero.
It was decided to make an attempt to save the station with the Soyuz T-13 , which was ultimately successful and is now counted among the greatest achievements in Soviet space history.
The film Salyut-7 refers to this and the events described in the article on Soyuz T-13, but with considerable deviations and heavily dramatized.
Technical specifications
- Length: 15.8 m
- Maximum diameter: 4.15 m
- Habitable volume: 90 m³
- Takeoff weight: 19,824 kg
- Number of coupling nozzles: 2
- Span of the solar panels: 17 m
- Solar cell area: 51 m²
- Number of solar panels: 3
- generated power: 4–5 kW
- Unmanned missions: 15
- Manned missions: 10
- Long-term stays: 5
- Main engines: 2
- Main engine thrust: 2.9 kN
See also
- International space station
- Russian space travel
- List of manned space flights
- List of space exits
- List of spacemen
swell
- Markus Nielbock : The little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station. German translation of the online article by N. Belakovski.
- David M. Harland: The story of Space Station Mir. Springer-Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg / New York 2005, ISBN 0-387-23011-4 .
- Hans J. Frank: Rescue of the Mir - The fantastic autobiographical memoirs of the Doctor F. Projects-Verlag, Halle (Saale) 2003, ISBN 3-937027-33-5 .
- Andreas Schöwe: Mission Space Shuttle - space adventure in pictures and text. Bechtermünz-Verlag, Augsburg 1999, ISBN 3-8289-5357-3 .
- Soviet Space Stations as Analogs. NASA (PDF, 23 MB, English).
Web links
- Raumfahrer.net: Salyut: The way to the Russian space station
Individual evidence
- ↑ Salyut 7 in NSSDCA Master Catalog retrieved on December 8, 2008 (English).
- ↑ Nickolai Belakovski: The little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station. Ars Technica , accessed March 18, 2018 .