Launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome; landing
160 km east of Dzheskasgan.
Following a one day solo flight Soyuz T-9
docked with Salyut 7-Kosmos 1443 on June 28, 1983. The cosmonauts became the
second resident
crew of the station.
Almost immediately after docking at Salyut
7s aft port, the crew entered Kosmos 1443 and commenced transferring the
3.5 tons of cargo lining its walls to Salyut 7.
Supplies carried from
cargo space ships Progress 17 and 18 arrived at the station. Numeruous
scientific experiments in different disciplines were done. On July 27, 1983 a
small object struck a Salyut 7 viewport. It blasted out a 4 mm crater, but did
not penetrate the outer of the window's two panes. It was not clear, if it was
orbital debris or from a meteor shower.
The crew loaded Kosmos
1443s VA capsule with 350 kg of experiment results and hardware no longer
in use. It could have held 500 kg, had they had that much to put in. Kosmos
1443 then undocked, in spite of Western predictions that the
FGB
component would remain attached to Salyut 7 as a space station module. The VA
capsule soft-landed on August 23, 1983 and the
FGB
component continued in orbit until it was deorbited over the Pacific Ocean on
September 19, 1983.
The first
EVA
was performed by Vladimir
Lyakhov and Aleksandr
Aleksandrov on November 01, 1983 (2h 50m). The cosmonauts
added a new panel to one edge of Salyut 7s top (centre) array.
Both
cosmonauts went out of the space station for another spacewalk on November 03,
1983 (2h 55m). This
EVA
was a repeat of the first. Together the two new panels increased Salyut 7s
available electricity by 50%.