MIRNEWS.269 24 AUGUST 1995 Euromir'95: The launch from Baykonur of Soyuz-TM22 is still on schedule for 3.09.95 at 0900UTC. S-TM22 will carry the reliefcrew (the 20th Main expedition) to the MIR-station toge ther with the ESA astronaut, the German, Thomas Reiter. The Russian crew consists of the MIR's captain Yuriy Gidzenko, who will make his first spaceflight, and the board-engineer Sergey Avdeyev, who already made 1 spaceflight. This crew and the stand-in crew flew to Baykonur on 23.08.95 to accomplish their final training. MIR: During the past weeks the complex passed during the nighthours. Meanwhile the passes shifted to the afternoon en eveninghours. The clear skies during the evenings made good visual observations possible. The cosmonauts executed a lot of experiments and repairs. They installed new gyrodynes in Module-D and resolved airseal problems. Probably one or more gyrodyna cases showed leaks. The cosmonauts solved this problem using a lute named 'germetik'. They did this by putting this lute around some leaking electric sockets. Scarce information: During the past weeks it was difficult for me to maintain sufficient grip on the MIR-operations. This due to familycircumstances, the nightpasses of the complex and the capricious behaviour of the geostationary satellite Altair. ALTAIR (Cosmos-2054): This geostationary satellite is still in use for communications between TsUP and MIR when MIR is moving within the footprint of Altair. Unfortunately the Russians do not use all possible windows. The satellite is not as 'stationary' as it should be: the inclination at the moment is more than 3 degrees and is still increasing. To keep the satellite in sight it is necessary to adjust the elevation and azimuth of the the dish-antenna regularly. A lot of Russian 'stationars' suffer from this evil. Another problem emerged on 25.07-.1995: the engineering beacon of the satellite transmitting on 11.380 GHz disappeared and did not resume operations since then. The relatively strong signals on 11.380 GHz enabled observers to maintain the direction of their dishantennae. With a spectrumanalyser showing the whole spectrum from about 10.3 GHz to 12 GHz the only thing they had to do was to wait until the downlink of Altair on 10.830 GHz showed up. Without that beacon it is possible to find the Altair trans missions for TsUP-MIR communications, phone transmissions as well as Television images, by turning the dishantenna in the calculated direction during 'windows', so when MIR and Altair see each other. In this way I managed to monitor traffic after 25.07.1995, especially during the morninghours; mainly phone communications, but also some sessions with Television images. During television images the cosmonauts showed themselves, but also the in- and outside of the MIR-complex. On 18.08.1995 they showed an aquarium in which a disoriented salamander was hopelessly struggling to find her way. It was obvious that the poor creature was not able to this without gravity. It remembered me of the Japanese quails, executing remarkable capers instead of flying before they had to be 'conserved' some years ago also during a flight on board MIR together with the pre sent commander Solovyov. After the salamander had been put in a container by Budarin, the cosmonauts showed other images, which I more appreciated, i.e. the exterior of the complex: the modules, the ships and some solararrays. After some 'Al tair-silent days' there was a long Television session today (26.08.95) during orbit 54386, 0730-0824UTC. The cosmonauts showed a spherical object and later on the interior of the baseblock. Chris v.d. Berg, NL-9165/A-UK3202.