Press Releases — 1996

Exactly one year after the start of the highly successful EUROMIR 95 mission, which saw ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter on board space station Mir for 180 days, a post-flight Investigators Working Group (IWG) meeting will take place on 3 and 4 September at ESA's European Astronaut Center (EAC) in Cologne.

On Monday 12 August, ESA astronauts Pedro Duque and Christer Fuglesang arrived at NASA's Johnson Space Center to begin training as members of the 1996 Astronaut Class.

ESA astronaut Jean-François Clervoy has been named by NASA to the crew that will make the sixth scheduled docking of the American Space Shuttle Atlantis to the Russian space station Mir. This mission, STS-84, is scheduled for May 1997. It is part of NASA's Phase One Program for the International Space Station.

At its meeting on 25 and 26 June 1996, the ESA Council was informed in detail of the measures taken after the Ariane 501 failure and of the proposed approach to revive the scientific objectives of the Cluster mission. Council noted that following the Ariane 501 flight failure on 4 June, the ESA Director General, Jean-Marie Luton, and the CNES Chairman, Alain Bensoussan, set up an Enquiry Board to determine the causes, investigate whether the qualification and acceptance tests were appropriate and recommend corrective action to eliminate the causes of the anomaly and other possible weaknesses in the system(s) found to be at fault. At the same time, they decided to strengthen the investigative powers of the Launcher Qualification Review, in particular by setting up specialised audits (see ESA/CNES joint press releases N s. 21 and 22 of 10 and 14 June).

Five months after its launch (cf. ESA press release 63/95) SOHO has now reached its final position and the first results of this new sungazing spacecraft will be presented to the media by a team of scientists at 10h30 on Thursday 2 May at 10h30 at ESA Headquarters, 8-10 rue Mario Nikis, 75015- PARIS.

After their 15-day flight on the Columbia space shuttle from 22 February to 9 March 1996, European Space Agency astronauts Claude Nicollier and Maurizio Cheli and Italian Space Agency payload specialist Umberto Guidoni will accompany NASA astronauts Andrew Allen, Scott Horowitz, Franklin Chang-Diaz and Jeffrey Hoffman to various ESA and national Centres for public conferences, debriefings and encounters with the press.

The 15-day international flight of the space shuttle Columbia came to an end on Saturday 09 March 1996 with a successful landing at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida. During the mission, the crew of seven, which includes three European astronauts, deployed the Italian tethered satellite and watched over a variety of microgravity experiments.

The record-breaking six-month EUROMIR 95 mission of ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter came to an end today with the successful landing of the Soyuz TM-22 spacecraft. Thomas Reiter and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Avdeev have been aboard the Mir space station since September 1995. The highlights of the mission included the first spacewalks by an ESA astronaut, a docking by the space shuttle Atlantis and extensive scientific research. The EUROMIR missions are an important step for international cooperation in view of ESA's participation in the International Space Station programme.

With a thundering roar, the space shuttle Columbia lifted off today, carrying three Europeans and four Americans into space on an ambitious mission to test for a second time the Italian Tethered Satellite System (TSS). The 75th space shuttle mission began on 22 February at 09.18 p.m. CET after a flawless four-day countdown.

ESA astronauts Claude Nicollier and Maurizio Cheli will fly as mission specialists on board Space Shuttle Columbia for flight STS-75. The launch is scheduled to take place on 22 February 1996. Lift-off is set for 15:18 hrs EST at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida (21:18 hrs Central European Time).During the 14 day long mission the modified Tethered Satellite System (TSS) will be redeployed and the US Microgravity Payload (USMP) will be flown for the third time. Landing is scheduled for 7 March 1996 at KSC in Florida.

The second spacewalk carried out by Thomas Reiter, ESA's astronaut on board Mir for almost six months as a crew member on the EUROMIR 95 mission, went smoothly. It started on schedule on Thursday 8 February at 15:07 hrs Central European Time with a sortie starting from the airlock located at the end of Mir's Kvant-2 module.

European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Reiter is to step into space for a second time during his 180-day mission aboard the Russian Mir space station. In October last year, Reiter became the first ESA astronaut to perform a spacewalk, when he installed a European experiment outside the station, as part of the EUROMIR 95 mission.

SOHO, the international mission led by the European Space Agency is the most comprehensive space observatory to study the Sun that has been flown to date. Thanks to a highly accurate launch it will start its scientific investigations earlie than planned and will be able to operate much longer than expected. SOHO (the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) will probe the interior of the Sun and address many fundamental questions about our daylight star.