Shuttle, Soviet Spacecraft Have a Close Encounter

It’s a small world.

As the space shuttle Atlantis prepared for a scheduled landing this morning at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California, it passed close enough to the Soviet space station Mir for astronauts and cosmonauts to see each other’s spacecraft.

The close encounters Tuesday were virtually near misses on the space scale, although there was never any danger that the two would collide.

On one pass, the two spacecraft were within 74 miles of each other, but that was the closest of the six encounters.

“Tally ho, Houston,” astronaut Jay Apt said when he spotted Mir on one encounter as the two spacecraft passed 130 miles apart over Australia. Mir was still far enough away that it looked like a star beneath the Big Dipper.

“Well, son of a gun, good for you,” responded Marsha S. Ivins, an astronaut at Mission Control in Houston.

The astronauts tried to contact Mir by radio. Mission flight director Wayne Hale said they heard Mir’s two cosmonauts--but did not know whether they were heard by the Soviets. Viktor Afanasyev and Musa Manarov have been in space since Dec. 2.

The astronauts spent most of their final day in space finishing up a few experiments and preparing for today’s landing. The Atlantis is scheduled to touch down at 7:34 a.m. PDT.

The five-day mission was one of the smoothest in shuttle history, and the crew managed to turn its one serious problem into a chance to show off the value of having people in space. When a critical antenna failed to deploy on the $617-million Gamma Ray Observatory, Apt and Jerry L. Ross went outside and fixed it.

That unscheduled spacewalk is bound to be cited repeatedly in the ongoing debate over whether it is worth it to send astronauts into space. Had the astronauts been unable to fix the antenna, the observatory would have been severely limited in the amount of data it could transmit back to Earth.

On Monday, Apt and Ross again went outside the Atlantis to test a number of vehicles that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is considering for the space station. The vehicles roll along a 47-foot-long rail that the astronauts attached to the side of the shuttle’s cargo bay.

Both astronauts told Mission Control that they preferred the simplest of the vehicles, a foot platform. The astronauts pulled themselves along the rail by hand.

Apt and Ross spent a total of 10 hours and 49 minutes on the two spacewalks.

The Atlantis is commanded by Steven R. Nagel, 44. The pilot is Kenneth D. Cameron, 41. The other member of the crew is Linda M. Godwin, 38.