Payload And Vehicle Weights: Orbiter (Atlantis) empty and 3 SSME's; 69,000 kg; Shuttle System at SRB Ignition: 2,047,561 kg; Orbiter Weight at Landing with Cargo: 114,163 kg; Spacehab: 6,551 kg.

Launch:

September 25, 1997, 10:34:19 p.m. EDT. On-time liftoff occurred after final approval for flight to Mir given earlier in day by NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin, following his review of independent and internal safety assessments regarding safety of Mir and Shuttle-Mir missions. The reviews included assessments conducted routinely prior to Shuttle-Mir dockings and two independent studies prompted by a spate of problems on the station, including a fire and a collision.

Landing:

October 6, 1997, 5:55:09 p.m. EDT, Runway 15, Kennedy Space Center, Fla. Rollout distance: 11,947 feet (3,641 meters). Rollout time: one minute, 22 seconds. Mission duration: 10 days, 19 hours, 20 minutes, 50 seconds. Landed on revolution 170, on the first opportunity after two opportunities Oct. 5 were waved off due to low clouds. Last flight of Atlantis prior to departure to California for second Orbiter Maintenance Down Period (OMDP). Scheduled to return to KSC in late August 1998 to begin preparations for STS-92, third International Space Station assembly flight.

Mission Highlights:

The seventh Mir docking mission continued the presence of a U.S. astronaut on the Russian space station with the transfer of physician David A. Wolf to Mir. Wolf became the sixth U.S. astronaut in succession to live on Mir to continue Phase 1B of the NASA/ Russian Space agency cooperative effort.

Foale returned to Earth after spending 145 days in space, 134 of them aboard Mir. His estimated mileage logged was 58 million miles (93 million kilometers), making his the second longest U.S. space flight, behind Shannon Lucid’s record of 188 days. His stay was marred by a collision June 25 between a Progress resupply vehicle and the station’s Spektr module, damaging a radiator and one of four solar arrays on Spektr. The mishap occurred while Mir 23 Commander Vasily Tsibliev was guiding the Progress capsule to a manual docking and depressurized the station. The crew sealed the hatch to the leaking Spektr module, leaving inside Foale’s personal effects and several NASA science experiments, and repressurized the remaining modules.

An internal spacewalk by Tsibliev and Mir 23 Flight Engineer Alexander Lazutkin was planned to reconnect power cables to the three undamaged solar arrays, but during a routine medical exam July 13 Tsibliev was found to have an irregular heartbeat. Foale then began training for the spacewalk, but during one of the training exercises, a power cable was inadvertently disconnected, leaving the station without power. On July 21, it was announced that the internal spacewalk would not be conducted by the Mir 23 crew but their successors on Mir 24.

On July 30, NASA announced that Wendy Lawrence, originally assigned to succeed Foale on Mir, was being replaced by Wolf. The change was deemed necessary to allow Wolf to act as a backup crew member for the spacewalks planned over the next several months to repair Spektr. Unlike Wolf, Lawrence could not fit in the Orlan suit that is used for Russian spacewalks and she did not undergo spacewalk training.

Following their arrival at the station Aug. 7, Mir 24 Commander Antaoly Solovyev and Flight Engineer Pavel Vinogradov conducted the internal spacewalk inside the depressurized Spektr module Aug. 22, reconnecting 11 power cables from the Spektr’s solar arrays to a new custom-made hatch for the Spektr. During the spacewalk, Foale remained inside the Soyuz capsule attached to Mir, in constant communication with the cosmonauts as well as ground controllers.

On Sept. 5, Foale and Solovyev conducted a six-hour external extravehicular activity to survey damage outside Spektr and to try and pinpoint where the breach of the module’s hull occurred. Two undamaged arrays were manually repositioned to better gather solar energy, and a radiation device left previously by Jerry Linenger was retrieved.

Docking of Atlantis and Mir took place at 3:58 p.m. EDT, Sept. 27, with the two mission commanders opening the spacecraft hatches at 5:45 p.m. Wolf officially joined the Mir 24 at noon EDT, Sept. 28. At the same time, Foale became a member of the STS-86 crew and began moving his personal belongings back into Atlantis. Wolf will be replaced by the seventh and last U.S. astronaut to transfer to Mir, Andrew S. W. Thomas, when the orbiter Endeavour docks with the Russian space station during the STS-89 mission in January 1998.

First joint U.S.-Russian extravehicular activity during a Shuttle mission, which was also the 39th in the Space Shuttle program, was conducted by Titov and Parazynski. During the five-hour, one-minute spacewalk Oct. 1, the pair affixed a 121-pound Solar Array Cap to the docking module for future use by Mir crew members to seal off the suspected leak in Spektr’s hull. Parazynski and Titov also retrieved four Mir Environmental Effects Payloads (MEEPS) from the outside of Mir and tested several components of the Simplified Aid for EVA Rescue (SAFER) jet packs. The spacewalk began at 1:29 p.m. EDT and ended at 6:30 p.m.

During the six days of docked operations, the joint Mir 24 and STS-86 crews transferred more than four tons of material from the SPACEHAB Double Module to Mir, including approximately 1,700 pounds of water, experiment hardware for International Space Station Risk Mitigation experiments to monitor the Mir for crew health and safety, a gyrodyne, batteries, three air pressurization units with breathing air, an attitude control computer and many other logistics items.

The new motion control computer replaced one that had experienced problems in recent months. The crew also moved experiment samples and hardware and an old Elektron oxygen generator to Atlantis for return to Earth. Undocking took place at 1:28 p.m. EDT, Oct 3. After undocking, Atlantis performed a 46-minute flyaround visual inspection of Mir. During this maneuver, Solovyev and Vinogradov opened a pressure regulation valve to allow air into the Spektr module to see if STS-89 crew members could detect seepage or debris particles that could indicate the location of the breach in the damaged module’s hull.

During the flight, Wetherbee and Bloomfield fired small jet thrusters on Atlantis to provide data for the Mir Structural Dynamics Experiment (MISDE), which measures disturbances to space station components and its solar arrays. Other experiments conducted during the mission were the Commercial Protein Crystal Growth investigation; the Cell Culture Module Experiment (CCM-A), the Cosmic Radiation Effects and Activation Monitor (CREAM) and the Radiation Monitoring Experiment-III (RME-III); the Shuttle Ionospheric Modification with Pulsed Local Exhaust (SIMPLE) experiment; and the Midcourse Space Experiment. Two NASA educational outreach programs were also conducted, Seeds in Space-II and Kidsat.

Orbiter performance was nominal.

• 1997 Sep 26 - STS-86  Crew: Wetherbee, Bloomfield, Titov Vladimir, Parazynski, Chretien, Lawrence, Wolf. Spacecraft: Atlantis. Payload: Atlantis F20 / Spacehab-DM. Launch Site: Cape Canaveral. Launch Vehicle: Shuttle. Duration: 10.81 days. Perigee: 354 km (219 mi). Apogee: 381 km (236 mi). Inclination: 51.60 deg. Period: 91.90 min.

  Atlantis was launched on a mission to the Russian Mir space station. The TI rendevous terminal initiation burn was carried out at 17:32 GMT on September 27, and Atlantis docked with the SO (Docking Module) on the Mir complex at 19:58 GMT. The crew exchange was completed on September 28, with David Wolf replacing Michael Foale on the Mir crew. On October 1 cosmonaut Titov and astronaut Parazynski conducted a spacewalk from the Shuttle payload bay while Atlantis was docked to Mir. They retrieved four MEEP (Mir Environmental Effects Payload ) exposure packages from Mir's SO module and installed the Spektr solar array cap. The MEEP experiments had been attached to the Docking Module by astronauts Linda Godwin and Rich Clifford during Shuttle mission STS-76 in March 1996. In addition to retrieving the MEEP, Parazynski and Titov were to continue an evaluation of the Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue (SAFER), a small jet-backpack designed for use as a type of life jacket during station assembly.

  Atlantis undocked from Mir at 17:28 GMT on October 3 and conducted a flyaround focused on the damaged Spektr Module to determine the location of the puncture in its hull. The Mir crew pumped air into the Spektr Module using a pressure regulator valve, and the Shuttle crew observed evidence that, as expected, the leak seemed to be located at the base of the damaged solar panel. Final separation of Atlantis from Mir took place around 20:28 GMT. After two landing attempts were waved off on October 5 due to heavy cloud cover, the crew fired the engines to deorbit at 20:47 GMT on October 6 and landed at Kennedy Space Center at 21:55.

• 1997 Sep 29 - Mir News 386: Computer failure 

  Compared to computer failures in the past the crew was able to restore the situation very quickly. In the night from 22 to 23.09 the crew successfully rebooted the same computer which they had replaced last week. The computer which failed on 22.09 had been stored for a long period in a cold and wet module.

  The following day the crew restarted a number of gyrodynes. Another failure they had to cope with was a malfunctioning ventilator of the Vozdukh, the CO2 filter. The replacement of this ventilator was easy, but the crew lost much time in finding a spare. The crew changed their sleep schedule to prepare for the arrival of Atlantis and for the period in which Atlantis will be attached to Mir. To be sure that the computer will remain operational the crew used an air duct for cooling. The gyrodynes functioned normally on 24.09 and so did the Vozdukh. During a direct TV-session in the early morning of 25.09 Foale commented images from the interior of the Base Block and explained the problems with the computer. He also showed some video-recordings of his EVA on 6.09.

  Launch of Atlantis for mission STS-86:

  On 26.09 at 0234 UTC Atlantis was launched while Mir flew over Europa and communicated with TsUP. The crew was listening to a direct report of the launch. No reaction could be monitored for Mir disappeared over the horizon.

  Atlantis, communications:

  Exactly 19 minutes after the launch (0253-0300 UTC) Atlantis was in our range and communicated with Houston via a tracking station in Spain. Wetherbee reported a minor failure which he should ignore. So he did with some other minor problems. He assured Houston to keep an eye on those matters.

  Docking Atlantis:

  In the course of 27.09 one of the channels of the computer behaved in a strange way. This lasted only a few milliseconds. A long time before the rendezvous Atlantis and Mir were in range of each other enabling both crews were to communicate via direct VHF-channels. Regretfully this all took place out of our range. At abt. 1900 UTC Atlantis reached a point at 200 Metes below Mir. From there by the use of the R-bar (or radial vector) approach she gently drifted to Mir with only a few little corrections with steering rockets by Wetherbee. After altering his approach due to a minor deviation of the attitude of the Mir-complex he flawlessly docked Atlantis at Mir. The Russians reported this success with the words 'kasaniye and zakhvat' (touch and capture). After a few minutes followed the hard mate and the airtight checks. The equalisation gave some problems: Foale felt pain is his ears and in Spacehab an alarm indicated that the equalisation was proceeding too quickly.

  For me it was a pleasure to hear Titov again from Mir. Almost 9 years ago he left Mir after being in space for 366 days. (He then returned to earth together with Jean Loup Chretien, who had been in Mir for almost a month.)

  Relief:

  On the first full day of the Atlantis/Mir link-up Wolf replaced Foale as a member of the Mir crew, when Wolf's seat liner for his seat in the Soyuz-TM26 had been installed in this ' ferry- and rescue vehicle'. Wolf will use the Module-D as his working- and living quarters. He will sleep in the airlock of that module.

  Radio traffic Mir:

  During the Atlantis/Mir link-up Mir will use the communications facilities of the Shuttle as well as the normal Mir frequencies. The Shuttle is also equipped with the 130.165 mc, the so called VHF-1. On board of the Shuttle this channel is AB-2. In the night from 28 to 29.09 Mir communicated with TsUP Moscow on 143.625 mc. During this traffic TsUP reported that the Shuttle was flying in 'free drift'. This took place in the framework of an attitude control experiment. During the next pass for our position at abt. 2200 UTC the Shuttle was in control of the attitude again.

  Spacewalk (EVA):

  This EVA will be made by Parazynski and Titov and is scheduled for 1.10 between 1844-2334 UTC (date and timeline not yet fully confirmed). The astronauts will retrieve a container with the MEEP experiment and 'park' a cap which might be necessary for the repair of Spektr's hull. In fact this will be an American EVA and the astronauts will enter open space through the airlock of the Shuttle. During the windows in which Atlantis/Mir is in range it might be worthwhile to monitor Shuttle's EVA frequency 279.000 mc (mode AM-Wide).

  Installation of the new computer:

  Possibly this computer will be installed during the Atlantis/Mir link-up. A final decision still has to be taken. If so this will be done after the EVA. If circumstances demand this the link-up of Atlantis and Mir can be extended by 24 hours.

  Chris v.d. Berg, NL-9165/A-UK3202.

• 1997 Oct 1 - EVA STS-86-1  Crew: Parazynski, Titov Vladimir. EVA Type: Extra-Vehicular Activity. EVA Duration: 0.21 days. Spacecraft: Mir.

  Retrieved MEEP materials exposure experiment from outside of Mir.

• 1997 Oct 5 - Progress M-36  Spacecraft: Progress M. Payload: Progress M s/n 237. Mass: 7,195 kg (15,862 lb). Launch Site: Baikonur. Launch Vehicle: Soyuz. Duration: 74.92 days. Perigee: 378 km (234 mi). Apogee: 390 km (240 mi). Inclination: 51.70 deg. Period: 92.20 min.

  Unmanned resupply vessel to Mir. Docked with Mir on 8 Oct 1997 17:07:09 GMT. Undocked on 17 Dec 1997 06:01:53 GMT. Destroyed in reentry on 19 Dec 1997 13:20:01 GMT. Total free-flight time 5.39 days. Total docked time 69.54 days.

• 1997 Oct 5 - X-Mir Inspector  Spacecraft: Inspector. Payload: Inspector. Launch Site: Baikonur. Launch Vehicle: Soyuz. Perigee: 377 km (234 mi). Apogee: 387 km (240 mi). Inclination: 51.70 deg. Period: 91.10 min.

• 1997 Oct 6 - Mir News 387: Communications Mir during mission STS86 

  The communications to and from the Mir during the link-up period of Atlantis and Mir demonstrated what we can expect when of the International Space station the Russian and American segments will be operational. For matters regarding the whole complex the American side will take care for the communications and traffic between the Russian segment and TsUP-M will only concern Russian matters (experiments, maintenance, advice, etc.) The lion's share of the communications went via Atlantis. During windows in which the Mir was able to communicate via Russian tracking facilities they only handled Russian matters. The communications between Mir and Atlantis took place via an intercom system. Sometimes Atlantis also took care of the Packet Radio traffic for Mir. During the link-up Mir seldom used the Altair-2 facility. Images of the approach of Atlantis and the EVA of Parazynski and Titov made from inside Mir were directly transmitted to earth via Russian tracking stations on UHF frequencies. Sometimes the comments on those images went via the VHF channel. On 28.09 Altair-2 was in use for the relay of video-recordings.

  Progress-M36:

  This freighter blasted off from Baykonur on 5.10.1997 at 15.08.57 UTC. All went well. The Progress-M36 will deliver the normal cargo: water, food, fuel, experiments and a spare computer. Among the repair material is a special glue ('germetik') to be used during the repair of the Spektr. Progress-M36 is expected to dock at Mir's aft docking port (Kvant-1 +X axis) on 7.10 at 1642 UTC.

  Transmissions Progress-M36:

  On 5.10 during the 3d orbit (1944-1946 UTC) Telemetry was heard in the 165 and 166 mc bands. During the 4th orbit (2114-2119 UTC) the signals in the 165 and 166 mc were very strong. The transmitter on 922.755mc was active during that pass. TCA was at 21.15.54 UTC

  Progress-M35:

  This old freighter is no longer needed and will separate from Mir on 6.10 at 1124 UTC for a short autonomous flight and decay in the atmosphere over a designated area in the Pacific East of New Zealand at 1424 UTC.

  Mini-sputnik:

  A small copy of Sputnik-1 will also be delivered by Progress-M36. During the next EVA of Solovyov and Vinogradov on 16.10.1997 this Sputnik will be 'launched' manually. This satellite will send 'bleeps' on a frequency in the 2 Meter amateur band to recall the launch of the first artificial earth satellite on 4.10.1957.

  Chris v.d. Berg, NL-9165/A-UK3202.

• 1997 Oct 6 - Landing of STS-86 

  STS-86 landed at 21:55 GMT with the crew of Wetherbee, Bloomfield, Titov Vladimir, Parazynski, Chretien, Lawrence and Foale aboard.