January 1982:milestones

August 1981

26 Voyager 2 flies past Saturn in its close encounter. Despite a jammed instrument platform for some of the fly-by. Voyager sends back images of the rings to show that they are even more complex than scientists believed after Voyager 1.

31 Shuttle Columbia is rolled out to the launch pad for an October 9 lift-off. An accumulation of small delays led to the later launch date.

September 1981

5 Soviet sources report that an Indian will be trained as a cosmonaut for a future space mission. According to the pattern set by previous foreign cosmonauts< two men will go through the training, with one finally acting as back-up.

21 Soviet booster takes the French Arcad 3 satellite into orbit. The 2200 lb craft will collect data on the magnetosphere at high latitudes over a planned 6 month lifetime.

22 A leak of nitrogen tetroxide during filling operations of Columbia’s reaction control system damages about 380 tiles, causing some of them to fall off. A faulty seal allowed the corrosive fluid to splash into the nose bay, where much of it was absorbed by thermal blankets, and down the starboard tiles. Most of the tiles are thought to be reusable and the repairs will be carried out on the pad. The 9 October launch date may now slip by over a month.

24 SBS-2, a communications satellite to serve US domestic business needs, is launched by a Delta-PAM combination. It will eventually be located at 97 deg. west longitude. This is the second PAM upper stage launch - the first, with SBS-1 in November 1980, was successful but a ground test failure delayed subsequent use.

29 Salyut 6 completes its fourth year of operation in space. At present it is docked with Cosmos 1267.

October 1981

5 The External Tank for STS-3 (ET-3) arrives at the Kennedy Space Center by barge, and is taken to the Vertical Assembly Building for processing. This will be the first tank to be flown (STS-3 launch date is scheduled for mid-March) without an outer covering of white paint, thus saving over 500 lb in weight. Later tanks will be even lighter.