ISSCOM 21 December 2009 (066)

Start Soyuz-TMA17 on 20 December 2009 at 2152UTC:

The nightly start and also the passes for my location meant for me a short night’s rest. Normally this would not be a problem at all , but this time my monitoring harvest was polluted by people trying to clean Rotterdam Airport from snow struggling to make the airport operational again. The ground services of that nearby aairport and also these snow-cleaning guys use also the Soyuz frequency 121.750 mc, though in AM-Wide. The Russian cosmonauts use FM-Narrow. Normally traffic by the groundservices gives not too much trouble for me, but this time the snow-boys were continuously talking to each other thus blocking a lot of the downlink transmissions. That what I could derive from the Soyuzcrew during the 3 passes for me follows hereby.

The callsign of commander Kotov, is OLIMP. Now and then the Japanese crewmember Noguchi (so Olimp 3) when he could be heard prompting Kotov.

S-TMA17, pass in 2nd orbit from 0052-0055UTC .

Kotov reads out parameters, the pressure inside the Soyuz: 815 mm, pressure of the nitrogen: 5935 mm. TsUP Moscow asks Kotov to repeat this. The connection is not good.

S-TMA17, pass in the 3rd orbit from 0225-0230UTC.

A lot of interference by our snow-boys at R’dam A/P, but not enough to prevent that I could hear that the 1st impulse (engine burn for orbitcorrection) had been successful. Kotov gave some data about this impulse. Kotov asks TsUP to repeat the last instruction. (He also seems to have problems with the interference by the snow-boys).The instruction was to switch on the accelerometer for 10 minutes at 0542 Moscow decree time. Then a series of data in the shape of numbers that still has something to do with that 1st impulse.

S-TMA17, pass in the 4th orbit from 0357-0403UTC, again a lot of interference.

Kotov reads out some pressure data and says that they are ready for the 2nd impulse. Then he gets a series of times, which tells him when the contact with tracking stations is possible.

Remark 1: They never add which tracking stations are involved. I wonder whether or not the NASA tracking stations White Sands and Wallops still play a role for the Russians in the Zvezda module.

Remark 2: I missed the pass in orbit number 5 for I did not hear the alarm-clock.

Remark 3: I hope the the snow-boys will keep quiet to-night, but it is snowing again so I am afraid that monitoring might be difficult.

Chris van den Berg, NL-9165