Mir-Pégase

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Mission emblem
Mission emblem
Mission dates
Mission: Mir-Pégase
Crew: 1
Begin: January 29, 1998, 16:33:42  UTC
Starting place: Baikonur 1/5
Departure in: Soyuz TM-27
Space station: Me
Coupling: January 31, 1998, 17:54:20 UTC
Decoupling: February 19, 1998, 05:52:50 UTC
Return flight in: Soyuz TM-26
Landing: February 19, 1998, 09:10:00 UTC
Flight duration: 20d 16h 37min
◄ Before / After ►
Mir-Cassiopée Me-Perseus

Mir-Pégase was the name for a Franco-Russian research mission in which the French spaceman Léopold Eyharts was on board the Russian Mir space station for almost three weeks .

preparation

The Pégase project (French for the constellation Pegasus ) was the fifth mission in which the French space agency CNES was able to send a spaceman to Mir.

In December 1996, Léopold Eyharts was selected as the crew for this space flight, his substitute was Jean-Pierre Haigneré , who had already participated in the Mir-Altair mission in 1993. On January 12, 1997, Eyharts and Haigneré went to the Juri Gagarin cosmonaut training center near Moscow to prepare for their mission there.

The launch was originally planned for August 5, 1997 with Soyuz TM-26 . On June 25, 1997, however, the Mir was rammed and damaged by the unmanned freighter Progress M-34 . The Spectrum module was completely inaccessible and the station's energy supply was not completely guaranteed. Eyharts was removed from the team, not only because the scientific process was not possible as planned, but also because urgently needed repair material could be brought to Mir. Eyhart's mission was delayed by six months.

scientific programme

The Mir-Pégase mission did not bring any fundamentally new experiments to the Mir. Rather, the investigations of the last Mir-Cassiopée mission were continued and deepened. The experiments were accompanied by the French control center CADMOS in Toulouse .

Life science

  • PHYSIOLAB : This laboratory made it possible to study the blood circulation before, during and after the space flight.
  • COGNILAB : This is a modular neuroscience and robotics laboratory for studying the nervous system . Among other things, the visual perception and the sense of time were compared with and without gravity.
  • FERTILE : This experiment to develop pleurodeles embryos was begun in the previous mission Mir-Cassiopée.

Materials science

  • ALICE 2 (Analysis des Liquides Critiques dans l'Espace - analysis of critical liquids in space) : as in the previous missions, hydrodynamic and thermal studies of liquids near the critical point were carried out again. The results were incorporated into the design of rocket tanks, among other things.

technology

  • CASTOR : This device was used to predict and measure the vibrations of large structures in weightlessness, for example the Mir space station. It was used to model the efficiency of dampers at certain points.

Mission history

The space flight began on January 29, 1998 with the launch of Soyuz TM-27 . In addition to Eyharts, the new Mir crew were on board: Commander Talghat Mussabajew and flight engineer Nikolai Budarin .

At the time of launch, the American space shuttle Endeavor was still docked to the Mir, which had exchanged NASA astronaut David Wolf for Andrew Thomas as part of the Shuttle Mir program . It had been discussed that the Endeavor would remain docked until the new crew came on board, which would have resulted in a crew of 13 on the Mir. However, this was rejected by the French because it would have hampered the research program too much. The Endeavor decoupled around the time the new Soyuz spaceship took off. Nevertheless, 13 people were in space at the same time, which had only happened once before in March 1995.

On the following day, January 30, 1998 the unmanned cargo ship docked Progress M-37 from Kwant module of Mir down, to make room for Soyuz TM-27, which automatically docked on 31 January. The freighter was parked for the next few weeks.

In addition to the NASA astronaut Thomas, the commander Anatoly Solovyov and the flight engineer Pavel Winogradov were on board the Mir .

The scientific program was completed in the following days. Most of the goals were achieved, only the Castor experiment suffered from a computer failure.

On February 19, Eyharts went with the previous team Solowjow and Vinogradow in the spacecraft Soyuz TM-26 and returned to Earth. The landing in Kazakhstan took place during a snow storm, which made the rescue work difficult.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rhein-Zeitung: (Almost) everything is sunshine again. July 21, 1997, accessed February 28, 2016 .

Web links and sources