Mission Highlights
Soyuz 39 docked with the first Mongolian cosmonaut aboard. The Fotons assisted the Intercosmos crew with station equipment and oriented the station according to the needs of the Visiting Expedition’s experiments.
On March 24 the cosmonauts installed cosmic ray detectors in the work and transfer compartments. On March 26 the cosmonauts performed the Illuminator ("viewing port") experiment, which studied the degradation of the station’s viewports. On March 27 Kovalyonok and Savinykh used the Gologramma ("hologram") apparatus to image a viewing port damaged by micrometeoroids. They repeated this March 28, when they also collected samples of the station’s air and microflora and removed the cosmic ray detectors for return to Earth. March 28-29 were largely devoted to studies of Mongolia from space. The Visiting Expedition crew checked out their spacecraft on March 29.
The Soviet news service TASS noted that by March 29th, Salyut 6 had conducted 20,140 revolutions of Earth.
Read more about this topic: Soyuz 39
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—Alvah Bessie, Ranald MacDougall, and Lester Cole. Raoul Walsh. Captain Nelson, Objective Burma, giving a subaltern a mission (1945)