STS-47: Postflight Press Conference

good morning and welcome to a slj crew postflight press conference I'd like to turn the program over to the commander Hoot Gibson go ahead thank you Barbara good morning and uh thank you for the opportunity to speak to you after the conclusion of a very successful Mission uh we of course are the crew of of space lab J uh STS 47 which of course was the 50th Flight of the Space Shuttle and I'd like to reint introduce the crew uh right to my right our mission pilot major Kurt Brown who was making his first flight aboard uh space lab J our payload Commander Mission specialist number one Mark Lee making his second flight aboard space lab J our flight engineer or Mission specialist number two J apt making his second flight on this mission Mission specialist number three Jan Davis making her first flight aboard STS 47 our mission specialist number four Dr May jemson making her fight first flight and our payload specialist number one Dr mamoru Mori uh the first Japanese astronaut making his first flight aboard STS 47 we're here today to tell you our story to tell you the story of space lab J and I think we can best do that with some of the images from the mission so with that if we can uh start the video uh the crew will describe the mission as we saw it using our video images and our Steel images well T-minus 6 seconds main engine was starting and uh shortly at t0 we started the 50th mission of the Space Shuttle once we clear the tower we began our roll maneuver which puts us in the orbital plane that our mission would be in and that was 57° of inclination and shortly after liftoff U we reached 20,000 ft and already by then we're at March 1 and you'll be able to see some of the shock waves off the external tank and solid rocket boosters and not much longer after that about 2 minutes into the flight uh we've used all the energy we can get out of our solid rocket boosters and we separate from those and now we're only on the uh the main engines for another 8 minutes once we got up uh we turned our H rocket ship into a spacecraft by opening the payload bay doors there and got ready uh to activate that laboratory you see in the bay and heading down the tunnel the more I look at this picture it's kind of like taking a Subway uh to work here uh it's about 20 ft long and uh it's fun to go down you just give a push off at one end you have to make a little jog as you go into uh the uh the lab here and you can see you got to stick your hand out to stop a little bit but once you're in the lab uh we started activation we got back there about 3 and 1/2 hours into the mission and the activation went very smoothly red chip started working on a material science experiment this is a crystalization experiment using image mirror furnace and I became also a subject of four different Japanese experiments this is a a perceptual multifunction experiment using a joystick and uh in those experiment scientists on the ground uh checked my eye movement while I attempted to track the flickering light twice a day of course we would hand over the vehicle we were working a dual shift Mission we had the red shift and the blue shift so in the morning we'd hand over from Blue to Red in the evening we would hand over from red to blue uh handing over both the Orbiter functions and the space lab on the blue shift we did the freeo electroforesis experiment which is a Japanese experiment where passing electrical current through uh some biological materials to separate them out according to their electric potential we had three of these experiments scheduled and we were able to do two extra ones during the flight so we feel like we had a really good uh experiment there very successful even though we did lose some of the down link data one of the experiments that you've heard a lot about was lower body negative pressure and these are just images from the lower body negative pressure the objectives of that experiment was to really see how the heart adjust to microgravity and to figure out can you use lower body negative pressure as a counter measure to help people to readjust when they come back some of the other experiments that we did that dealt with medical uh issues were fluid therapy system um the fluid therapy system we used really talked about uh can you produce IV fluids in space and whether or not you're able to uh successfully administer them but we did spend a lot of time working with lower body negative pressure and we got lots of results back good results back while the space lab crew was busy working back in the lab the orbitor crew was also busy on the mid deck we had several experiments that we ran one of these is the protein crystal growth which we see here being activated once we got on orbit the another experiment we had going was a medical uh data take of energy utilization and we uh collected uh uh some blood samples test for glucose and we logged all the food and water and uh some urine samples we took to better understand how the body actually uses the food that we intake while we're in Zerg environment the first thing I had to do in the morning right after I woke up uh was to attach three different electrodes on my body except the fourth and fifth days I wore all the time a backpack called PMs and to monitor my electrocardiogram and wave and skin conductance level every day uh in the afternoon I wear this uh and uh I spent a couple of hours to uh conduct cell culture experiment using a specially designed culture kit and Optical microscope we mainly observed uh how cells are developed under micro G and took many microscopic pictures uh I'm not sure if we had a record number of inflight manance procedures but we did have some fairly critical ones early in the mission we had a water leak in the material science rack and we went in there and it was a fairly uh simple thing to fix once we took the insulation away it was similar to just fixing a leaky faucet at home but it uh kept the the loop intact and we're able to continue with furnaces such as this which is the image mirror furnace uh it was one of the funer projects to work on on orbit because it was rather interactive you had to establish a melt Zone in this particular scene we're putting a quartz tube around the sample and then once we got the U image mirror closed we went ahead and brought the samples together and uh we bring them together so that the focus of the there's a light bulb in the back and also one in in the in the cover uh the focus of the energy is on the gap between the two samples uh this was one of them that we did uh we did two other uh experiments in the in the image mirror furnace one of them was a glass cube experiment uh this glass cube we the objective was to turn it into a glass sphere and do some measurements uh in this particular case uh the temperature got a little bit higher than we expected uh and I guess it's one of the reasons that you do experiments to try to understand the reaction to certain materials in zero gravity and the other one that was uh looks like it's very successful was our samur skyp sample we have a sample here that's about oh I'd guess uh you know 6 to 8 mm long in addition to the image furnace we also had uh some other major furnaces in the two Material Science racks we had four other major furnaces including this one which was a continuous heating furnace which had two heating Chambers and two cooling chambers of course we also had the large isothermal furnace and the gradient heating furnace as well as our acoustic levitation furnace which we're able to uh conduct our experiments because we had the uh the water leak fixed in the material science racks for a total of 22 material science experiments we had a couple of audio dosimeters that we kept in place in different parts of the Orbiter every time I came back to do one uh the payload Commander accused me of coming back to perform pilot science this is a little bit of pilot science that we're seeing right here and uh this is a a study in angular momentum and of course we're all familiar with the way an ice skater uh starts out with their arms out and retracts their arms to increase the uh rotational speed and uh our pilot is here checking it out to see that it does in fact work in in weightlessness this spooled him up pretty good watch watch his eyes when he finishes that's [Music] okay we had a uh relatively new piece of gear on board the bicycle ergometer and uh this is really a a wonderful Contraption and we were able to use this up on the flight deck and it's quiet enough that we're able to to exercise during sleep periods after a busy day of doing experiments and uh working out we headed for the Galley and the Chow up there is really pretty good here's Mark making the meal and uh we were very fortunate to eat uh early and often during this Mission and uh we all liked it and we found chopsticks up there are pretty practical in zg although you'll notice our Japanese patal specialist is having crosscultural experience he's the one using the spoon uh but we found curried rice up there was superb and uh I'm going to recommend taking it as a standard item Chopsticks were real good for most of the foods we ate up there but not for all of them so we used other techniques uh for certain foods that we ate there and here you'll see it um getting ready to get dark up there which of course it did 16 times a day and it uh it gets dark in a big hurry as you're just about to see uh out the window there right behind Kurt just like on Earth you have certain personal hygiene things you must take care of this is the red shift getting up and getting ready to go to work for for a day and uh doing a little uh teeth brushing there and um washing our hair and um our commander you know he you can only do so much with what you got to work with but he's uh he's doing his best here and it's actually pretty easy in space you don't have to find a wall to hang a mirror on you can kind of just let it hang around but uh he's he's working away there takes a little while to get ready in morning understand that four members of our flight uh had a lot of interesting publicity down here the Frog embryology experiment was one that I think was very successful we um took four female frogs up we F we uh gave them a human coron ganat trro and caused them to ovulate we're able to actually uh have over a 100 live t Pooles that were brought back that were actually conceived and born in space uh the experiment went very well uh the results now the investigators are at am Research Center working busily on things but very generally the gross appearance of the Tad Poes that were conceived in zero g are looked very normal they seem very normal so it was a a good experiment one of the things we also wanted to look at was how what was the behavior was there a problem with um their tadpole's interpretation of what goes on in zero g can they swim normally so we actually took up Tad poles that were hatched here on the on the ground and watch their swimming Behavior some of the things it seemed like is that they had a difficult time figuring out um which way to swim as you can see so they swimmed in circles but we're able to uh bring tadpoles back down and also observe their behavior we also did our uh studies on the blue shift of angular momentum and since I am an ice skater it was uh kind of fun to play with pulling my arms in going faster and then putting them back out and uh slowing down we also had fun with uh other things and watching the physics of how they behave when we spin them around those a pair of pliers J is using Sor Rex which Isam radio equipment to communicate directly to the people on the ground we contacted many schools around the world here we flew over Japan it was very impressive for me to see my hometown from space this is hokido just we saw Northern island of Japan Sao is a capital of the Hokkaido where I used to work now most of the time when we flew over Japan was cloudy but I had a one time to see a Tokyo metropolitan area I was very much impressed that uh Tokyo bay was very clean as you see there this is Hurricane Bonnie which was about 500 mil North Northeast of Bermuda when we took this photo and you can see the spiral bands around in the welldeveloped eyee it's a classic hurricane just after that we got ready to check out the vehicle uh for landing and here we are checking out the elevons during what we call the flight control system check out you can see them moving back there uh on the wing this wide angle View and we were well satisfied the vehicle was ready for entry and so was the ground well after a very successful Mission it's time to come home even though we got an extra yday so we had to prepare the vehicle for entry got in our suits got all strapped back in uh made our deorbit burn that was very successful and we're on our way home this is a view out my window we're in the the red is a glow from enter the atmosphere the uh the expectation that orbit does and you can see the sunrise we're in a big right bank at that point uh back uh in La Ora atmosphere with the hoot flying here we starting to get some uh tips off the wings and uh then doing some more checking we'll be in our right turn here on our heading alignment Circle preparing to roll out on Final um to complete the landing phase the Orbiter as you see looks like it's a very nice flying aircraft uh it looks very uh very happy in that environment there on the ground it looks like it's falling like a brick as we probably all know we had had a lot of concern about the weather at the cape and being able to get back in there but as you you can see we had just an absolutely beautiful day to come back to the Kennedy Space Center here's suit rolling out on Final and shortly you'll see him put the nose down a little bit we'll pick up some more air speed and prepare for the final Landing phase I got to fly the Orbiter for a few seconds on entry and uh thanks to hoot and uh the uh over flies very nicely it flies like a much smaller aircraft than it really is very nice handling machine A View From the vertical Assembly Building as we come in you can still see the the the moisture off our wings getting ready my primary job in life now is to put the gear down there comes the gear and uh here's the Commander coming in for very very spectacular Landing um hit all the parameters that we're looking for as we come in to land very nice touchdown we touch down at 205 knots and shortly after that we were calling out air speed we're looking for 175 knots and at a point we uh I got to deploy the drag shoot we were the first deploy with the nose still in the air a test that we're doing to hopefully expand the envelope and then the nose touched down about 130 knots approaching about 60 knots we gotten about all we could out of the drag shoot so we go ahead and jent and then we let the orbit roll to a stop like in the previous emissions as I mentioned this was the conclusion of a very successful Mission we had just uh one one red shift Handover one red shift tag up left to make and this is uh Kurt and I having our final red shift tag up just after we'd rolled to a stop