World Notes SPACE

The television pictures beamed to earth last week from the Soviet space station Mir were a series of firsts: the first pictures from space of Astronaut Abdul Ahad Mohmand, 29, an Afghan air force pilot who rocketed from Baikonur space center in Soviet Central Asia to a midweek space-station rendezvous, accompanied by two Soviet cosmonauts; the first pictures beamed by Soviet television of an Afghan orbiting the earth while reading passages from the Qur'an.

The Soviet news agency TASS said Mohmand's main assignments are participating in experiments on the nauseating effects of weightlessness and photographic surveys of his native land. But the images broadcast to the folks back in Kabul suggested that Mohmand was given a larger mission: helping Moscow win friends in Afghanistan as the Soviets withdraw their troops from that divided country.