Salyut 7 EO-4
| Mission dates | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Mission: | Salyut 7 EO-4 | ||
| Crew: | 2 to 3 | ||
| Call sign: | 1st phase: Памир (" Pamir ") 2nd phase: Чегет (" Tscheget ") |
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| Rescue ships: | Soyuz T-13 / Soyuz T-14 | ||
| Space station: | Salyut 7 | ||
| Start: | June 6, 1985, 06:39:52 UTC | ||
| Started by: | Soyuz T-13 launch | ||
| The End: | November 21, 1985, 10:31 UTC | ||
| Ended by: | Landing of Soyuz T-14 | ||
| Duration: | 168d 3h 51min | ||
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Salyut 7 EO-4 was the name of the fourth long-term stay on board the Soviet space station Salyut 7 . The mission ran in two phases: first two cosmonauts took off with Soyuz T-13 and put the defective station back into operation. Then the crew was partially swapped with Soyuz T-14 , and scientific and military operations began. Due to illness of the commander, the mission had to be terminated prematurely.
crew
Main team
- Vladimir Alexandrovich Dzhanibekov , commander during the first phase
- Viktor Petrovich Savinych , flight engineer during the first and second phases
- Vladimir Vladimirovich Wasjutin , commander during the second phase
- Alexander Alexandrowitsch Volkov , science cosmonaut during the second phase
- Georgi Gretschko , on-board engineer during the transition phase
Substitute team
- Leonid Ivanovich Popov , Commander during the first phase
- Alexander Pavlovich Alexandrov , flight engineer during the first and second phases
- Alexander Stepanovich Viktorenko , commander during the second phase
- Yevgeny Vladimirovich Salej , science cosmonaut during the second phase
- Gennadi Michailowitsch Strekalow , flight engineer during the transition phase
situation
The Salyut 7 space station was unmanned after the third long-term crew had completed a seven-month stay.
The next team was Vasyutin, Savinych and Volkov. They were supposed to conduct military experiments brought to the space station on a TKS spaceship . Training for their mission began in September 1984 and was scheduled to start in March 1985.
In October 1984, however, a defect occurred on Salyut 7, and in February 1985 it was clear that the mission could not take place as planned.A repair team had to be formed that could make the space station functional again, or at least restore it to the extent that a targeted crash was possible.
In March 1985, veteran Vladimir Dschanibekow was nominated as commander of the repair mission, who was considered an expert in electrical systems in space travel and also had experience with manual docking maneuvers ( Soyuz T-6 ). As a flight engineer, he took over Savinych, who had experience with the repair of Salyut space stations from the last long-term mission of Salyut 6 ( Salyut 6 EO-6 ). Wasjutin and Volkov were to follow up with another spaceship as soon as Salyut 7 was operational.
Mission history
Start and pairing
The launch of Dschanibekow and Savinych with Soyuz T-13 took place on June 6, 1985. The approach took place in a two-day, fuel-saving course.
At a distance of 10 km from the space station, Dschanibekow interrupted the approach in order to supply the on-board computer with further data. The Soyuz then automatically approached within 3 km when Dschanibekov took over the manual control, supported by Savinych on the computer.
The space station stood across the Soyuz spaceship, the solar cells were placed randomly. Ordinarily, the space station would have turned in the right direction and the solar cells would have aligned with the sun.
At a distance of 200 m, Dschanibekow interrupted the approach for 10 minutes because the sun was unfavorable. He then flew around the Salyut to visually examine it for damage. Finally, on June 8th at 08.50 UTC, it docked to the front coupling port of the space station.
Recommissioning
For safety reasons, the cosmonauts wore respiratory protection when they opened the airlock to the Salyut and took an air sample. The space station was dark, completely silent, and very cold. The cosmonauts wore winter clothing including fur hats and used flashlights. The scales of the thermometers on board only reached down to 0 ° C, and so no accurate temperature measurement was possible. One of the cosmonauts spat against the wall and determined the time for the saliva to freeze. From this information, the flight control was able to estimate the on-board temperature at around -10 ° C.
Janibekov and Savinych removed the covers from the viewing windows so that at least part of the time they had sunlight to work. One of the first tasks was to check and restore the power supply. All eight Salyut batteries were completely discharged, two of which were unusable.
The carbon dioxide that the two cosmonauts exhaled posed a great danger . Usually this was regenerated, but without electricity there was no ventilation. Thus, due to the lack of gravity, a CO 2 cloud formed around the cosmonauts , which could lead to suffocation. For safety reasons, only one of the two cosmonauts was supposed to work in the space station, while the other stayed on board the Soyuz spacecraft and could rush to help with breathing protection in an emergency. After a ventilation pipe was laid between the Soyuz and the Salyut, this situation eased.
Janibekov soon found the source of the problem. A sensor between the solar cells and the batteries had failed so that the batteries could no longer be fully charged. A telemetry system should have reported this error to the ground station, but this system was also defective. The batteries were becoming increasingly exhausted, so that the solar cells were no longer aligned with the sun.
Dschanibekow was able to bypass the faulty sensor. With the Soyuz engines, the space station was rotated so that the solar cells were illuminated by the sun. Janibekov had switched the batteries so that they could be charged one after the other. Without energy from the batteries, the cosmonauts would have had to abort the mission; fresh batteries would have had to be delivered by a new crew. After a work phase of about 24 hours, Dschanibekow and Savinych were able to return to the heated Soyuz spaceship for a break.
The next day, June 10th, the air heating could be switched on. Salyut 7 was usually unheated during the manned phases because the crew in the well-insulated station produced enough body heat to allow a comfortable room temperature. The heating was only necessary for the unmanned periods in order to keep the on-board systems at operating temperature.
The team discovered some broken valves and made a list of spare parts that were to be delivered with the next space transporter.
On June 13, the Salyut's attitude control system was reactivated. This made it possible to dock the next Progress transporter again.
The temperature in the station had only increased slowly. Since hoar frost had formed on the walls, floating water droplets would have formed if the temperature had risen rapidly, which could have caused problems in the electrical devices. Only when most of the water had evaporated was the wall heating switched on and on June 16, the room temperature again exceeded freezing point. This enabled the water regeneration system to be put back into operation. So far, the cosmonauts had used the Soyuz's water supply, which lasted for about eight days.
The two Salyut tanks each held about 200 liters and were thawed by turning the corresponding side of the space station into the sun. However, there was no hot water available to them because the kettle had frozen and destroyed by ice. To warm milk, Janibekov and Savinych used a powerful spotlight.
When the room temperature had reached 16 ° C, the heating was switched off.
First freighter
The next space freighter Progress 24 with the most urgent spare parts as well as water and fuel was launched on June 21st. As usual, the coupling took place two days later.
The load with a mass of two tons included two new space suits for exits (those on board could no longer be used), a kettle, three batteries, two solar panels, warm shoes, medical equipment and medicines, films, 280 liters of water as well as fuel.
Progress 24 remained docked at the station until July 15 and was then loaded with rubbish and then deliberately crashed.
Second freighter
The next Progress space transporter took off on July 19, 1985. Since the remote control had failed first, this freighter was given a Kosmos number rather than a Progress number. But control could be regained and so Kosmos docked on July 21, 1669 . It was an extended model for the planned Mir space station that could be coupled and uncoupled several times.
EVA
On August 2, 1985, Janibekov and Savinych carried out the first exit from their mission. The new spacesuits that were delivered with Kosmos in 1669 were used.
They assembled another set of gallium arsenide solar cells. In addition, two scientific experiments were installed. The French experiment Comet was supposed to collect dust from the comet Giacobini-Zinner , the experiment Medusa exposed various materials to space conditions. The work outside the Salyut took five hours.
From August 27, the cosmonauts loaded the Progress freighter with garbage. The next day, Kosmos 1669's engines lifted the Salyut's orbit before the transporter disengaged. A few more proximity tests were then carried out. Kosmos 1669 was the last Progress transporter to dock with a Salyut station.
Team expansion
Janibekov and Savinych had done their most pressing work. Salyut 7 was fully functional again and some scientific experiments had been carried out. Now it was time to tackle the military part of the mission, which was to be under the command of Vladimir Vasyutin.
Soyuz T-14 with commander Wasjutin, flight engineer Grechko and science cosmonaut Volkov docked on September 18. Wasjutin and Volkov were newcomers to space, while the much older Grechko was already making his third space flight.
For the following week, five of the cosmonauts lived and worked aboard Salyut 7. Grechko used the time for a thorough inspection of the space station, but scientific experiments were also on the program.
The team split on September 25th. Savinych stayed on board, so that - together with Wasjutin and Volkov - the originally planned crew was complete. Janibekov, whose repair job had been completed, returned to Earth with Grechko, who was only scheduled for a short stay.
Soyuz T-13 undocked on September 25, 1985. Instead of initiating the brake ignition shortly thereafter, as usual, the spacecraft remained in orbit for 30 hours, with three approaches with the Salyut systems switched off, similar to the situation on June 8th.
Landing of Soyuz T-13 with Dschanibekow and Grechko took place on September 26th in a new landing zone 220 km northeast of Dscheskasgan .
Cosmos 1686
Wasjutin, Volkov and Savynich were scheduled to be crew members for a TKS spaceship in the early 1980s , but it never went into manned use. An unmanned version of this spaceship was coupled fully automatically to the front coupling port as Kosmos 1686 on October 2, 1985. It was not necessary to move the Soyuz spaceship to clear the rear port because the TKS spaceship was not carrying any fuel for the Salyut tanks.
Instead, this space transporter carried various observation devices and other experiments with it. In addition, a mast was delivered that was to be installed at the station during an outboard operation.
The TKS spaceship was much larger than a Progress transporter and was about the size of the Salyut station itself. In this respect, Kosmos 1686 was less a space transporter than an expansion module for the space station. In a similar way, the Mir space station was later to be expanded with TKS-based modules.
Vasyutin's illness and early return
From the end of October, the team began to fall off the schedule, because Vasyutin no longer took part in the work. He stayed in bed all day and was obviously ill. On October 28, 1985, Vasyutin spoke to the flight control about the problem for the first time. The crew were instructed to wait for their condition to improve.
From November 13th, the cosmonauts encrypted radio communications. Vazyutin's condition was unchanged, but urgent treatment seemed unnecessary. An early return with landing in the Soviet Union was possible on November 17th at the earliest. However, the lighting conditions in the landing area were still insufficient on this date, so it was decided to land on November 21. The cosmonauts began to prepare medically to return to Earth. They also set all Salyut systems to run automatically.
The Soyuz-T spacecraft was designed so that a single person could control the brake ignition and landing. Since Vasyutin was no longer able to do this due to his illness, Savinych, who was officially given command on November 17, took over this task, but Volkov would also have been able to do so.
Vazyutin's disease was called appendicitis in the Soviet press . However, the fact that the earliest possible return option was not chosen speaks against this. Later portrayals of those involved come to different assessments of the nature of Vasyutin's disease, his handling of it and any co-responsibility on his part: Statements by his crewmates Savinych and Grechko (both civil engineers) as well as the former chief designer W. Gluschko indicated a urological problem (possibly one Prostate inflammation), which existed before the flight, but had been veiled by Wasjutin, and criticized Wasjutin's alleged lack of commitment and perseverance. On the other hand, Wolkow and the then head of cosmonaut training W. Schatalow (both military pilots like Wasjutin) spoke of life-threatening problems caused by weightlessness or an infection caused by the ventilation system of the coupled TKS spaceship - explanations that tend to relieve Wasjutin. (These different representations are also to be seen against the background of the rivalry that has existed for decades between the design offices and the civil engineer-cosmonauts who have emerged from them on the one hand, and the military cosmonauts on the other.) The official investigation followed Shatalov's exonerating assessment. On December 30, 1985, all three cosmonauts (Wasjutin, Savinych and Volkov) were given the usual awards (Hero of the Soviet Union and Order of Lenin) - against the opposition of Glushko, Vasyutin and Volkov who wanted to refuse to be named Hero of the Soviet Union.
Significance for the Salyut program
The Soyuz T-13 crew succeeded for the first time in docking with a space station that was floating in orbit without any control. The rescue of this station is one of the most impressive actions in the history of repairs in space.
The expansion of the station by Kosmos in 1686 was a complete success, and many scientific results were also presented.
Savinych, who participated in both phases of the flight, had achieved a flight time of 168 days for this mission. That was far less than the third team's 236 days. Together with his previous flight ( Soyuz T-4 ) he had now spent 242 days in space, which brought him 4th place on the ranking list (behind Valeri Ryumin , Vladimir Lyachow and Leonid Kisim ). The longest American flight duration was the Skylab-4 crew, which had been in space for 84 days.
However, a setback for the Soviets was the early return of the team, which, similar to Soyuz 21, was caused by health problems of a team member.
The Salyut 7 station was again unmanned in space and many of the devices that had just been delivered were not yet fully used. On the other hand, the new Mir space station was ready for launch. It was therefore decided that the next crew should first put Mir into operation and then fly from there to Salyut 7 to take various devices with them.
See also
Web links
- NASA: Mir Hardware Heritage (English; PDF; 4.1 MB)
- Almanac of Soviet Manned Space Flight (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c B. Hendrickx: Illness in space . Spaceflight 53 (British Interplanetare Society, 2011)
- ^ David Michael Harland, John Catchpole: Creating the International Space Station . Springer, March 2002, ISBN 1-85233-202-6 , p. 416.