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From: mishkin%UUCP@YALE.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.space
Subject: More on Satellite Retrieval
Message-ID: <11810@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 27-Oct-84 19:52:24 EST
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.11810
Posted: Sat Oct 27 19:52:24 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 29-Oct-84 03:22:53 EST
Lines: 26

From:  Nathaniel Mishkin 

While we're all wondering about some details of the satellite recovery
schedule for the next shuttle mission, I'd like to add my own wonders:

What are the constraints on the rendezvous?  According to the PBS show,
the satellites are in quite an elliptical orbit.  I got the impression
that the apogee of the orbit is well higher than the maximum possible
shuttle apogee.  So presumably they have to time the rendezvous so
that the shuttle meets the satellite when the satellite is at a low
point in its orbit.  How long do the astronauts have before the 
satellite drifts too far away?  How elliptical can the shuttle's
orbit be made?  How much force needs to be applied to the satellite
to get it into the shuttle bay?  (After all, it DID fire an engine so
it does have some momentum that has to be overcome, right?  My physics
is, er, a bit rusty.)

How dangerous is all this?  I mean, in the most recent shuttle mission
during the refueling experiment people commented on the "danger" of
dealing with the fuel in that environment.  Mightn't there be some
unexpended fuel sitting in the satellite's booster?  Would you want
to be staring down the gullet of an engine that didn't behave as
expected in the first place?

                -- Nat
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