STS-46: Postflight Press Conference

good afternoon welcome to the Johnson Space Center for the STS 46 postflight crew press conference this is the crew show today so with that I'm pleased to introduce crew Commander Lauren Shriver and we'll let Lauren introduce the rest of his crew Lauren thank you Jeff and uh let me say uh thank you to everybody for being here this afternoon uh the crew would uh like to take this opportunity to fill you in on what we feel was a very very exciting Mission uh you've heard various uh little bites of uh our discussions from on orbit and uh we had a lot of excitement up there we'd like to share a little bit of that with you uh we were here about a month and a half ago and told you all the things that we were setting out to do on the mission and now what we're going to do is uh come back and tell you a little bit about what actually did happen before we do that though let me uh briefly reintroduce everybody uh on my right is uh the pilot of the mission Andy Allen and of course Andy was also kind of the blue shift honcho and they found out exactly how difficult it was to shift about 12 hours away from everybody else's work schedule and uh found themselves play playing tily Winks in the middle of the night while the rest of us got good sleep going into the flight but they did an outstanding job of course during the flight uh ms1 and uh the first Issa uh Mission specialist to fly on a NASA space shuttle flight Claude nicolier Claude was also the primary RMS operator and Eureka system specialist uh MS2 and flight engineer Mara Ivans and uh she did uh photography and eim and IMAX and concap and just about everything else on the flight as well uh ms3 and payload Commander Jeff Hoffman and Jeff of course was uh our primary tether Dynamics person and expert on the flight and uh knew a little bit about everything else on the flight I think as well ms4 our Dr Spock and uh science representative Franklin changz and uh PS1 Franco malerba the first Italian ever to fly in space and uh Franco's got some words about well what have some words about uh the science that was actually accomplished and uh his impressions of uh a firsttime flyer in space I think he was uh tickled pink so to speak on his experiences there were some pretty exciting moments up there and and we we knew there would be and we told you there would be during the pre-flight press conference and now we have the proof why don't we go ahead and and transition to the movie now and uh we'll narrate this as we go along uh as I mentioned uh time flies and uh we we had a lot of fun all through the whole thing uh first thing of course prior to getting ready to go is uh getting ready for the orange suits all of us getting uh prettied up doctored up we didn't all need our hair braided but uh here's Claude getting an initial TSS uh familiarization we uh enjoyed going out to the vehicle uh in daylight this was my first uh experience with that and it was kind of nice to be able to see what was going on for the first time I've seen a couple space shuttle launches uh from different viewing areas and it was always very spectacular being on the inside even was quite a bit more spectacular launch countdown was about as perfect as it can get and I apologize we were 48 seconds late and uh I was just I was hoping that we could do it in 46 seconds but it missed by a couple seconds the uh the thought that really crossed my mind more than anything else going through all of this was was what it took to make all of this happen it's hard to to think about and imagine the thousands of people or the tens of thousands of people that can make all of this work and it takes such a complex piece of machinery and make it look so simple and look so easy it's very graceful and very easy as it goes up on his asent there's some Shock waves that are coming as we're going through Mach One which is about uh 40,000 or so well this was the first of 126 space sunrises that we saw uh just uh soon after we got onto orbit we opened the payload bay doors and the complement of payloads that we carried you can see the tethered satellite up towards the front of the cargo bay behind it the Eureka which we soon deployed and then the eim payload so first order of business was to get the arm out and uh pick up Eureka this is the grapple of Eureka and the kago bay I'm approaching Eureka with the arm and this was a view from the ector camera and uh this is a position I had from uh operating the remote manipulator system at this point I'm very close to Eureka and I'm going to Grapple it press the trigger to Grapple it while Andy was maneuvering the Orbiter and Franco was taking pictures it was a blue shift activity at this time now I'm unbirthing Eureka from the kago bay this black structure that you see in front of Eureka are the folded solar rays uh this whole operation took about 6 hours while we're lifting ureka out of the bay and also performing various Maneuvers that as I mentioned before to calibrate sensors now you see the folded solar array on one side of urea pretty clearly and it it's about at that point that we started having problems with payot communication but when we were flying over Sam sites like Kuru French Guana the ground can command for instance solar redeployment you which you see on this picture here and in a few second you'll see the tensioning process at the end of the Solar Ray deployment you see the Solar Ray that take a stiff shape and wave somewhat indicating a proper stiffening and tensioning of the cables uh that were used to deploy the solar rays a spectacular view of a pass over the Red Sea and the Middle East with u at the tip of the arm shortly before release of Eureka and here we go after release this is coming back over the Kennedy Space Center again we just really like this picture the uh the separation burn uh went real fine we moved out to 1,000 ft and we actually kept it to work orbal CICS and to save a little bit of propellent we actually work from about 920 ft out to about 1150 ft this is basically what Eureka looked like at 1,000 ft away from us and then we did the otm burn which is about 5 hours later which put it in its proper attitude uh Jeff went ahead and took that picture for us beautiful picture of the moon going by Eureka here we are setting up the science operations center down in the mid deck uh we have this uh personal computer the upto-date Technologies coming into the space shuttle too and now we're uh raising the boom getting ready to deploy the tethered satellite so far everything with TSS has gone perfectly the boom Rose um when we got up to the top we had the first difficulty we attempted to extract one of this this little umbilical at the top it didn't pull out so we rotated back and forth a little bit we uh we put it in a position where we could expose it to the Sun heat it up here's a a nice close-up view of it um finally um in in uh attempting to keep it exposed to the sun we ended up with a sight that we never thought we'd see the uh TSS boom and the satellite pointed down towards the Earth someday on a future Mission we may actually lower a tether satellite down into the upper reaches of the atmosphere and that'll also be very exciting but in any case uh finally Lauren uh moved the whole Orbiter away and you can see the umbilical pulling uh we did then we were ready for Fly Away we had an the first attempt didn't work but finally uh we got the thing going and here it is and this is at portion then that uh where the Orbiter is in free drift and the satellite as you can see here is moving uh very slowly away from the boom tip uh but notice also of course that it is very stable there's no tendency for the satellite to uh uh roll off or do any pitching moments and uh this the tether was very stable also each of us had an assigned testas that we were doing uh all through the early deploy phases and that always and tail somebody checking uh CRT displays up front and looking out the windows to make sure that the satellite and the tether system were in a in a safe configuration uh we continued to fly it away uh you're about 15 or 20 M here notice that the tether is still very straight and very stable in this configuration it wasn't until we got much longer lengths that we started to notice any significant tether oscillations at about about a 25 M length then we deactivated the KUB band system for communications and converted it into a radar and started tracking the satellite so we could tell uh an additional means of where it was now the tether was getting long enough that we started to see a lot of vibrations this this may look like a very loose tether but but there was normal tension in this tether this is just the way a tether behaves uh this is the system after we hit the first snag um it it already has pretty much reached stability and we were getting ready now to run the tether out for this so-called running start um it it and here it goes you can see we were spewing tether out of uh we have probably about 20 or 30 m of slack tether you can see how it it takes up the coiled shape that it was on the Reel but before long uh the satellite uh keeps moving away it it pulls out the slack tether and uh it's basically uh until we uh reach the next snag it continued to move away and even after the next snag it basically went into a stable configuration I guess uh the next part was uh the red shift had been up uh for for a pretty long day here and we need to get them put to bed so we put them to bed and uh for the blue shift it was pretty much watching the satellite that night normally we were going to be watching about 20 kilm and doing our normal station keeping this is a site out the coass which is a optical alignment site which is one of the ways that I could judge how the satellite was maneuvering for us was actually extremely well behaved in over an 8 hour period I never even fired it yet during the all the on station phase of course all the science instrumentations were working and uh we were also watching with the top instrumentation the satellite which here shines against the uh image intensifier uh picture of this guy we weren't able I said to continue the deployment this is how you retrieve a satellite you have to move the shuttle underneath in order to get the tether to come back uh in the proper place and that's what we're about to do all of our operations were really conducted in the manual mode and I think that's important to note because uh this system was supposed to have been an automatic and it points out the value of the human being in the loop uh the satellite was being controlled by uh by jet firings uh from uh keyboards and the tether was being being controlled also from the keyboard and everything was very smooth uh the inlines were turned in uh turned on a little bit uh later than expected but the docking was very very smooth after docking the satellite on the docking Ring We commanded the retraction of the boom which you see here uh and there was still some uh alignment of the satellite to perform prior to latching the satellite in kago Bay and there was of course a big relief in the crew uh that time but you see now is the ohms burn that lowered us from 160 Mi altitude down to the 128 mile altitude and now while we had our eim experiment in the bay looking at Atomic oxygen we proceeded with some different medical experiments in a little bit more relaxed time for the crew um while Jeff is doing his medical experiments uh those of us that could now get to a window have not been able to see a window were upstairs uh taking pictures you also see in my hand there the controller that ran the IMAX camera we had in the payload Bay now we had the opport opportunity to see the Earth out of the uh Windows whereas before we've been looking pretty much at space and and we took advantage every time we could we noticed one thing at 128 miles that the Earth appears to move much more quickly past you than it does at any higher altitude and we had the opportunity to look at 230 and 160 miles the Earth just smoked right by this is a Java you can see the line of of volcanoes that look like they've been laid out with a straight edge you can also see how blue the planet looks I mean that it always amazed me how very blue things looked one of the uh things that most interest uh us these days is the burning of the Amazon forest and what you see there are little plumes of uh uh ground fires in the area of central Brazil and then of course we got to be able to zoom in with the very powerful lens and you can see some of the patches of deforestation in the state of rondonia in Brazil is it's an area that we've been watching over and over uh as missions go by and we see all the the patterns of deforestations in in Long geometrical uh lines as roads and population expands into into that area we uh also tried to uh photograph uh the entire Caribbean uh Basin and of course Brazil and Central America we managed to uh to get pictures of all of the Central American capitals but uh we're not able to get Costa Rica because it was always cloudy over there I guess this is a part of the uh Persian Persian golf that is the Persian golf some o s and uh a big uh big storm is that Javier Javier there somebody else H this is Baja California and we come on down through Central America and Southern and um southern Mexico and we're able to zoom in Into the City of Acapulco I think you can appreciate the power of that lens it's hard to it's hard to keep the camera uh steady when you're zooming in that close and so you have to wedge yourself against the window as I said most of the area was cloudy but uh we were able to get a few good shots a feel for what it would take to do a simple task in but like changing the batteries in your camera um it was sometimes more than a tu we've been using the cameras a lot so the batteries are pretty hot but keep it I mean think about this try to change batteries one day without ever dropping apart and here we're playing a volleyball Olympic Games Switzerland against Italy it's a good way of keeping in shape in space and of course learning about Dynamics in space this is something that we ran as a way of explaining in a in a future Audi visual to uh youngsters how tetus Works in space this is the principle of angular momentum conservation and as you see when we elongate the Teter we have a slower rotational speed and of course the principal investigator of This research at the end of the experiment has the right to take advantage of the of the apples physics Works while some of us uh still thought it was necessary to do a little bit of work during these final couple days you can see we did have an ergometer on board that was one of our Medical dsos but Jeff uh still found found time to uh play with his all metal yo-yo there and demonstrate yet more principles of physics with that the uh phcf the growth hormone experiment was their one mid deck experiment it required that you take it out and rotate it five times in 10 seconds every day so instead of rotating the box I'm holding the box and Franklin's rotating meat well eventually it gets time that we got to come home and uh this is just lur and I on the flight deck doing the flight control check out you can see some of the elevons moving there in the picture there as we check out all the flight control services then we put the red team to bed and make sure we're all set to go for deorbit the next morning when we launched it was just about a new moon we were up for eight days one day more than we had planned and this is what the Moon looked like when we finished 126 times we got to see the moon rise and then the sun set over the payload Bay and it was just as beautiful every time we saw it but it was finally time to come home by the time we were ready to come home we knew that uh we were coming home either to KSC or to Edwards so it was a simple matter of uh putting on the suits and and getting ready to to do the entry we just didn't know where we were going to burn to for a while but KSC cleared out the weather as you can see here is only scattered clouds the very smooth air a lot of moisture we didn't see the condensation trails that you folks did on the ground but uh it was a pleasure to fly the entry and the Final Approach through that nice smooth air for a change uh as we come in uh start to pull up about 1,800 ft and passed through 300 ft Andy got the gear down uh another major task I assigned him a long time ago and he did a marvelous job of that uh probably much better than my subsequent Landing but uh it it looks okay and it really did look good from the inside as well so uh we touched down there uh about 1,900 ft down the runway roughly and then rolled to a stop on Runway 33 at KSC uh this is really some kind of an experience here after eight days in space and uh uh I remember uh sitting there doing switch throws and everything that wasn't too bad but that initial attempt to stand up was something else eventually we all found our legs though and uh uh stumbled out of the spacecraft and had a look around