Period: 88.8 min
Mission highlights
Soyuz 17 carried cosmonauts Georgi Grechko and Aleksei Gubarev to the Salyut 4 space station for a month-long stay. Upon entering the new station, they found a humorous note from its builders, telling them to "Wipe your feet!"
When Soyuz 17 docked, Salyut 4 was in an unusually high circular orbit at 350
km. Astrophysics was a major component of their mission (hence the high
altitude). The crew discovered that the main mirror of the solar telescope had
been ruined by direct exposure to sunlight when the pointing system failed.
They resurfaced the mirror and worked out a way of pointing the telescope
using a stethoscope, stopwatch, and the noises the moving mirror made in its
casing.
Experiments carried out on board the station were mostly of an astronomical nature, with observations of the Sun, the Earth, and the planets.
