| Mir EO-15 | |||||
8 January 1994 10:05 GMT. Landing Date: 1994-07-09 10:32:00. Flight Time: 182.02 days. Alternate Name: Soyuz TM-18 (Afanasyev, Usachyov). Flight Up: Soyuz TM-18. Flight Back: Soyuz TM-18. Call Sign: Derbent (Derbent - Russian city). Crew: Afanasyev, Usachyov. Backup Crew: Malenchenko, Musabayev. Program: Mir. Mir Expedition EO-15. Docked at the Kvant module on January 10 at 11:15 GMT. Transported to the Mir orbital station of a crew comprising the cosmonauts V M Afanasev, Y V Usachev, and V V Polyakov for the fifteenth main expedition. The Soyuz TM-18 descent module landed 110 km north of Arkalyk in Kazakhstan at 10:32:35 GMT on July 9. Narrative (adapted from D S F Portree's Mir Hardware Heritage, NASA RP-1357, 1995) On January 10, 1994 Progress M-19 departed and Mir Principal Expedition 15 (Viktor Afanaseyev, Yuri Usachyov, Valeri Polyakov) arrived aboard Soyuz TM-18. Tsibliyev and Serebrov boarded Soyuz TM-17 on 14 January for the return home. Soyuz TM-17 struck Mir during the customary inspection fly-around prior to deorbit burn. Tsibliyev and Serebrov were conducting proximity operations with Mir. Among other things, they were photographing a NASA JSC-built docking target they had installed during one of their EVAs. They were unable to arrest Soyuz TM-17’s forward movement because of an improperly set switch, and so struck Kristall two glancing blows with its descent module. The blows temporarily disabled Mir’s orientation system. Masterful piloting by Tsibliyev prevented Soyuz TM-17 from striking Mir’s antennas and solar arrays. After the incident, the EO-14 cosmonauts and ground controllers checked over Soyuz TM-17, while the EO-15 crew on Mir checked over Kristall. They found no damage. Normal Mir operations resumed, and Soyuz TM-17 made a normal re-entry. Afanaseyev, Usachov, and Polyakov examined Kristall when they repositioned their spacecraft at the Mir forward port on 24 January. They detected no damage from the Soyuz TM-17 recontact. On 30 January Progress M-21 arrived at the station and remained docked until 23 March. Launch of Progress M-22 was delayed to March 22 from March 19 by heavy snowfall at Baikonur Cosmodrome. The rails used to transport Progress M-22 to its launch pad were covered in snowdrifts up to 7 m deep, so the spacecraft and booster could not be moved from their assembly building. The freighter finally docked with Mir on 23 March. The week of March 28, Mir cosmonauts fired an electron beam gun at the Swedish Freja plasma and magnetospheric physics satellite to study space plasmas and Earth’s magnetosphere. At the time Mir was 383 km above the Pacific, south of Alaska, while the 214-kg Freja satellite was 1770 km above the southeast Alaskan coast. A Canadian ground station monitored the test, which resembled one conducted on the STS-45 Space Shuttle mission (March 24-April 2, 1992). Soyuz TM-19 arrived at Mir with the Principal Expedition 16 crew of Yuri Malenchenko and Talgat Musabayev on 3 July. Valeri Polyakov, who had arrived on Mir with the Principal Expedition 15 crew, remained aboard on his long-duration mission. The EO-15 crew returned uneventfully aboard Soyuz TM-18 on 9 July. Mir EO-15 Chronology
Bibliography and Further Reading
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