we think our path symbolizes the
teamwork
not only here at the johnson space
center but across the nasa contractor
team
and bridging the oceans all the way over
to russia
i think
the successful accomplishment of
shannon's long-duration mission
and our successful docking and joint
operations aboard the mir
is a testimony to that fact
we had a pretty spectacular night launch
at the end of our day
uh let me tell you there wasn't anybody
that uh that was dozing off on the
flight deck though because as soon as we
cleared the tower the master alarms
started going off
and it seemed like they were going off
all the way to main engine cutoff about
uh eight and a half minutes later
uh
right after main engine cutoff i said uh
tell the mirror that atlantis is
underway
and then we heard that the shannon even
saw us all the way to main engine
cut-off from from the mirror which was
pretty spectacular
right after we got in orbit you can see
it was a night launch but where we were
in the world it was already daytime and
we saw the sun rise on orbit and uh
immediately put terry to work not only
on the apu subsystem but uh but also on
the overhead panel and
and this is what starts turning uh what
is a rocket ship there for eight and a
half minutes into a spacecraft for
10 days
it's it's just an amazingly versatile
ship that we have the orbiter
and
as you can see here terry's in the
overhead panel and we're reconfiguring
getting ready to do our ohms to burn
one of the things you might have noticed
in that slide was that i wasn't sweating
one of my little crew members pointed
out that was the first time he had seen
anyone get to orbit and not be drenched
and that's in large measure to the
liquid cooling garment that we wear
under our spacesuit now and i tell you
we'd all like to to thank the people
that came up with that for us
once we got on orbit we had a few days
to do science before we docked with the
mirror this is one of our experiments
car walls is holding something called
mgm
or it's called
the mechanics of granular materials
and
it studies the behavior of materials
like sand which is what's in that that
container or any other granular material
and we hope that with this experiment
engineers will be able to use the
information to strengthen building codes
and earthquake areas
get more information about what triggers
avalanches study beach erosion even the
behavior of materials in silos it was a
good experiment and they got good
information out of it next slide please
bill can you back up one i just want to
say one more thing please
you might notice that carl's hat there
he was wishing that he had a st louis
cardinal head on
next slide please
the we called this slide the attack of
the water bags
one of the things we transferred to here
was was water unlike us where we make
water with our fuel cells when we
produce electricity
they don't make water and it has to be
carried up to them and they use it they
break it apart to get their breathing
oxygen of course they use it in their
galley to drink and rehydrate food with
each of those bags weighs about 100
pounds we transferred 20 of them i think
it was a new record over 2 000 pounds of
water
and we figured well we filled eight of
them before we docked when the hatch
opened the first thing i want to do was
because you can see they're like sea
cows floating around with valerie where
do you want all this water and he said
just keep it on the shuttle until you
get ready to leave but
we managed to find a spot for it and get
it over to the to the mirror next slide
please
uh this is uh basically how we start our
day we didn't really launch with the
flight plan uh it was tip step to us the
first thing every morning and you can
see the tips machine there and and the
roll of paper
that comes out it was pretty extensive
and it took us a while to cut and paste
into our flight plan every day
jay also has on a headphone there that's
connected to our vhf radio we use that
for ship to ship conversation with the
mirror and also for an experiment called
sarx which turned out to be a really
good deal and i'm sure it'll be
important to long duration crew members
because each of the crew members on 79
got to make a personal phone call to
their families and i can tell you that's
a real boost for morale after you've
been up there for a while and we also
used it to find out sports scores things
like that with random contacts
and just to the right of jay is one of
our freezers the blue box there and that
was used to return
biological samples uh from shannon's
stay on mir back to earth
next
slide on flight day four we got ready to
do our rendezvous bill got back in his
commander's chair and picked out the the
rendezvous checklist and
did a series of burns of course to start
our preparation for the ride
well you just can't imagine what a
breathtaking sight it is to see
something in the crew optical sight
that is the mirror at approximately 600
feet away and of course we can see it
much further out as the brightest star
in the sky but uh
as soon as we had done all our mid
course correction burns you could start
to see a little glimmer and then and
then you'd see detail and the solar
arrays and then the modules but but i
think this this picture here at 600 feet
shows you just what a remarkable complex
it is that they've assembled over the
last 10 years
of course the difference uh
between our flight and the previous one
was uh the orbiter was a little
different with a double space ave module
and the other thing was the mirror was a
little bit different because during
shannon's stay on board the prorota
which means nature science module had
arrived so we had a different orbiter
configuration and a different mirror
configuration
this is a shot that shannon took of our
arrival and we're uh
inside 170 feet at this point
you can see towards the aft part of the
payload bay the double space have module
and then towards the forward part you
can see the orbiter docking system with
the androgynous docking adapter there at
the top the black part
you can also see our ku band radar
slung over there
on top of the radiator on the right-hand
side of the orbiter
we're uh
we've got our noses pressed to those
overhead windows those two little
windows they're looking at shannon as
she's looking at us as you might imagine
and you can also see the reaction
control jets kind of around the
periphery of the orbiter there
this is a picture shortly after we were
docked and and we show you this
because another change to the mirror
configuration from the previous flight
was in the upper corner of the picture
you can see the cooperative solar array
which was deployed during shannon's
mission by
uh yuriana friendco and yuri usochov
that array extends down below the nose
of the orbiter during the approach
the other thing that you see extending
over the forward part of the payload bay
is one of the base block arrays on the
mirror station that extended down within
a couple feet of the overhead window you
can see it in its unfeathered position
right now after we've arrived and the
solar rays are trying to trying to track
the sun
and gather solar energy but during the
actual docking that particular array was
cutting across the
left-hand overhead window
well after we get the hatches open we
got down to what i considered was uh the
primary purpose of sds-79 and that was
the crew exchange and to accomplish this
cruise change we had to get john's suit
from the shuttle over to mir and his
seat liner and all the periphery
equipment that he needed for the soyuz
in case they have to use the soyuz as an
emergency uh escape vehicle and then we
had to get john in his suit and then he
had to get in the soyuz and do a
pressure check and after the pressure
check on the scaphandra came out okay
then the russians would accept john as a
crew person for mayor
next slide
and after we got john's suit uh
checked out and it was uh deemed okay
then it was time to take my ponder out
of the soyuz where he'd been uh
you know for the entire flight
and bring it over to the shuttle and get
ready to come home and there sasha is
helping me get that out he's the board
engineer that's now up on mir
next slide
and this is a shot of valeri the
commander that's now up there on mir in
the base block
this was the third commander that
i had worked with since um oh march so
that's not bad
and then right after this shot then i
was officially a member of the
shuttle crew so then i was with my
fourth commander and
that's not a bad way to work you know
four different commanders in six months
it was pretty good
well in addition to uh john and
shannon's personal gear and the transfer
of that over very early in the mission
we also had
for the first time a double space had
and the aft uh
part of that space hab is where we had
most of the other logistics and supplies
we were going to transfer
over to mir and then used to return the
items from mir that shannon and and the
russians were sending home
this kind of became a transfer
headquarters here in this corner that's
where we kept our paperwork and our
procedures you can see there something
that's also unique is
the brown
cloth lockers in front of me
those were for weight savings in space
hab and you can of course see the
regular hard lockers over my right
shoulder so we had a variety of
different things we could stow items in
large and small
behind my back there is where we had
three batteries we were taken up to mir
and also right behind my head you can
see a couple of the powered science
experiments that we later were going to
transfer to mirror i also noticed the
colored
labels on those cloth lockers
the blue ones meant they already had the
return items in them pink ones meant
items still to go to mirror and white
cards meant items not to be transferred
next
as i mentioned we transferred some
russian things over this is a piece of
russian hardware weighed about 250
pounds it's a gyrodyne this is bill
transferring it from space hab through
the tunnel almost into the ods module
and he'd make a straight up turn out of
the picture here to go up in
to the mirror these gyrodynes they have
several on mirror and they're used for
attitude control
this is our
most valuable transfer item
and that uh shannon is this is much like
a couple of days later in the mission
shannon is where the gyrodyne came from
and she assured us she didn't weigh
quite as much and we did move her for
entry
transferred uh some scientific samples
over just to leave in microgravity for a
long period of time this is actually a
crystal uh growth
large dewar it's actually like a big
thermos bottle that uses liquid nitrogen
for cooling and we placed it over
in cavan juan behind a panel and it will
stay there until sts-81 goes and
retrieves it as we retrieve two that the
sts-76 crew had left over in kvant
well you know i spent a year in building
one doing management training and this
is what i really spent most of my time
doing
this is up on the flight deck a typical
flight deck picture you can see the
camera equipment back behind me there
one of our
seats there behind me that we use on
ascent and entry and
pretty much where we spent a lot of time
taking pictures out the window and you
could always see mirrors you looked out
the window overhead there
this was obviously a staged picture
because i don't think we ever saw tom
like this the entire mission other than
when they were taking this i'll tell you
he had total control of the the transfer
ops from start to finish i don't think i
ever saw him relax
well here's john uh working in the
in his new home
on mir this is the pre-rota module
and
the on the left
and on the right are racks
u.s standard
equipment
racks like the ones we have in the space
shuttle
and they're filled with
the scientific equipment that we
transferred from the mid deck and the
space have over over to mir
and in the foreground
you can see
an ex a french experiment called alice
and so here's john in his laboratory
working very hard he just started right
away and as we were undocking
you could hear john on the other air to
ground trying
working very hard to fix
one of the other payloads that we
transferred that had a problem the
bioreactor and he got it fixed squared
away
excellent
i'm uh i'm here in the uh
in the f portion of the double space hab
uh with uh
a new friend the uh orlan space suit uh
the airline spacesuit is the eva suit
that the russians use
and
up until this time the russians had
never been able to bring one of these
suits back to earth
to analyze and and to see how they did
after several uses in space
and so we're the first ones to be able
to bring an orlan suit back
and
this suit will
first go to russia and be refurbished
and
examined by the engineers at the zvezda
company there in russia
and then we'll be upgraded and return to
johnson space center for testing with
the space station
airlock
test assembly and
we'll prove it out
for use in the international space
station
now
we tried to use every
possible nook and cranny
for transfer
and in fact on our eris rack which is a
micro microgravity
test rack that we flew for space station
we filled that with russian food
containers and
near the end of our mission we removed
those food containers
from from that rack and transferred them
to mir and then we took empty food
containers which you see in this picture
and
shannon
and
sasha there are taping them together to
be inserted back into the heiress so we
had enough room to bring them home
we have a picture here
in the central node and that's
the mirror commander valerie corzone in
the node and and that is uh where all
the modules
uh come together in mirror
and we would come up through the cristal
module into this node
and then
you just sort of look around and try to
figure out which module you wanted to go
in and you'd have to look up and down
and
left and right and
it was
probably the most disoriented i've ever
been in space
you'd look into the base block and you
would see people in the normal attitude
and then you'd uh
pan your body 90 degrees and you would
see somebody standing on what appeared
to be the ceiling although
what really was was the module was uh
clocked 180 degrees and so those kind of
visual things happened all the time on
mir and it was it was very exciting very
interesting
one of the
things that consumed a lot of our time
during our dock phase was
filming imax tom akers and i and
our commander bill reedy spent a lot of
time setting up imax scenes
both in mir and on the shuttle
and we've had a chance to look at those
and they look really good
and we're looking for the incorporation
of this uh
these scenes into the new imax
film about our phase one program tamir
and
that's supposed to be released
in march of 97 to a theater near you so
stay tuned
and there's this is a a picture of
shannon and uh this is in the tunnel
adapter of the uh of the space shuttle
she made sure she was on the right side
of the hatch when we got ready to undock
fortunately with all the science and
transfer activities going on we each
still managed to find time to look out
the window and take pictures of our
planet and we'll show you some of those
pictures at the end of the slides and
something else we were taking pictures
of what's the mirror next slide please
we had a detailed test
numbered 11 18
and it was the photo survey of the
mirror so we tried to take pictures of
literally every square inch of the
mirror that was visible to us the solar
panels the the modules everything that
we could and the engineers here at jsc
will study those pictures and will
determine how well the materials that
mir is made out of have withstood 10
years or less in space and they can use
those to see where what materials have
degraded what materials have oxidized
and you can use the location of some of
the
off gas materials for instance that have
stained another part of mirror to
determine exactly where it's coming from
what it is and we hope to our space
station people will avoid
those types of materials on the space
station that storm by the way is in the
southern india ocean and southern indian
ocean and it's one of several that we
saw while we were in space
next slide
well we got ready to say goodbye and one
of the things we want to do is take a
picture the first crew picture of the
new mirror crew
and you can see the three of them there
and john and his uh
his cosmonaut suit next time
shannon says she has mixed feelings uh
about leaving i'm certain that she did
the cosmonauts
treated us and heard very very well that
it was a real team up there and
anyway it was time for her to say
goodbye and
come aboard shuttle for the trip home
next slide
after we closed the hatches uh we spent
the night attached to the mere still and
then the next morning we got up and
undocked and i was fortunate enough to
to get to do the fly around the mirror
and this is a shot from that you can see
the docking module clearly at the top of
the screen this is a picture of the
mirror at the terminator and
you can see the blackness on the dark
side of the earth at the top and of
course we're leaving the light at the
bottom
people have asked me if the mirror was
easy to see on the dark side and it was
very easy to see they have aviation
lights red and green and even flashing
lights located on a mirror it was very
easy to to see the thing during the fly
round next time
well our joint program with
the russians didn't stop when we
undocked one of our
objectives is to
do a program of earth observations of
particular sites of interest to
scientists both in russian right here at
the johnson space center where a
fantastic
group of people studies
the earth from space and disseminates
all that information to scientists all
around the world on a continuous basis
we carried
plenty of film and plenty of hasselblad
cameras to bring you back a few shots
and we're just going to show you a
couple here but we have uh several
thousand more that we'll be showing you
over uh the next couple of years as they
trickle out of building eight next slide
please
this is uh the view out the aft windows
of an area that's been in the news uh
uh quite a bit this is the middle east
the tale is pointing to the city of
jerusalem
in israel and the jordan river connects
the dead sea at the bottom or center of
the picture
to the sea of galilee up near the top
and just a fabulous area of the world to
fly around of course it's a desert so
you can see it there's not a lot of
clouds
and we enjoyed very much flying over it
pretty much every day next slide
this is an area that i saw for the first
time but because it had not been cloudy
when they talk about deforestation in
the rain forest this is it
this is an area the size of about
half of pennsylvania in
the brazilian state of rondonia along
brazilian road 364 and we've watched in
pictures from the shuttle that are
analyzed here at the johnson space
center this area just getting less and
less of the dark forest and more and
more of the light green farmland
unfortunately the farmland is not usable
for very long uh after as little as
three to four seasons the soil becomes
unusable it's just not suitable for uh
farming and uh they abandoned it and
take the chainsaws a little further into
the rainforest
next slide please
this is uh
an awesome example of the power of
nature as well as the power of man to
transform the planet this is typhoon
violet just northeast of the philippines
and
you can almost feel the atmosphere
getting sucked down into that giant low
pressure area where the hole is at the
eye of the storm there in the center
hundreds of miles away from us
next one
and uh we'll end our earth observations
with uh
a beautiful scene of the aurora uh and
the tail of the orbiter lit up by
moonlight while the stars flicker in the
background there and you can see some of
the stars that appear to be uh closer to
us than the planet there that's uh
because there's a little air uh that you
can actually see through and there's
that yellow layer right at the top of
the atmosphere that's up about 60 miles
that you can see through so that's
that is our
fragile planet down here and protected
by this very thin layer of uh of earth
and we as a crew were very happy to
be able to fly the spaceship that you
all
built and operated for us to get get up
there and see these beautiful sights
this is just a portrait of our crew
taking the base block of the mirror
station
and the 64 thousand dollar question is
who took the picture
well that concludes the slides we uh we
have a short movie that we'd like to
show you
the footage that we
assembled from from our mission
our sponsor
the crew patch
this is uh shooting up before we're
getting ready to go
terry welcome the pilot
j app ms1
ms2 tom akers
ms3 carl walls
and john
nasa mirror number three
on our way out to the astrovan
still awfully awfully dark at that hour
of the morning let me tell you
about the light up though big big time
six seconds there prior to liftoff the
main engines come up to thrust
and we're on our way
first master alarm
the diagonal thing was shaking so much
that terry and i had uh a real time
trying to read the uh the scratch pad
line of what was going on unfortunately
we had tom there to mid value select
between the pilot and the commander and
he properly informed us what what was
going on with our vehicle
i think the folks that were there at the
cape had a real spectacular view uh not
only of the srb separation here a little
after two minutes
but
all the way up the east coast
we're going to get a little bit closer
view here
and a special camera in the umbilical
wells that was able to capture that
unfortunately the external tank came off
in darkness so there wasn't any residual
light from the from the main engines or
anything to capture that
well once we got on orbit we opened the
payload bay doors
to reject some of the heat of course
produced by the fuel cells and got a
first real good look at the space tab
and the back end of the payload bay and
the orbiter docking system and the
trajectory control sensors those boxes
right on the beam in the front of the
cargo bay very happy to see everything
was in good shape we opened up the hatch
to get back into the space hab a couple
hours after launch uh after verification
that all the atmosphere back there was
good and it's the first flight of a new
habitable volume it went just great what
a wonderful place to work and have all
the logistics and live and sleep it was
just huge uh i mean it was like a big
building inside
those of you who have offices around jsc
know what i mean when i say this is a
lot bigger than any office i've ever had
terry's getting ready here to transfer
some of the water specifically squeezing
out a sample into a sample bag for
analysis on the ground and boy
it's a good thing he was in the best
shape of anybody on the crew except
maybe shannon go do that that's it was
pretty hard here we are checking out one
of
the jsc experiments on board a
bioreactor
so called it it is designed to supply
nutrients to all
sides of a cell in three dimensions
unlike a two dimensional petri dish
cells can grow just like they do in the
living body we took sterile samples of
that as john will do every week that
he's up on orbit to ensure for the
principal investigator or doctor up at
massachusetts institute of technology
that everything is working well
if all goes well we'll learn how well
cartilage like is in your knees or your
nose grows up there on orbit
here we are on the second day of the
flight preparing the active rack
isolation system a risk mitigation
experiment for space station for test we
tilted the rack out just as people will
do hundreds of times on the
international space station uh and this
thing that uh about the size of a big
vending machine here and uh about the
same weight too we're real careful with
and
took all three of us to get that out
there and make sure
it was all in good shape then carl and i
went to work
setting it up for
what turned out to be many days of tests
on board the idea of that system was to
isolate the small vibrations that you
have in space
for the benefit of experiments such as
this one this is a furnace
that was to melt metals sintered metals
are used in everything from machine
tools to exotic space structures here we
are inserting a sample into that furnace
for melding and
later analysis on the ground
back in the back tom was examining all
of his transfer items and getting
everything
ready
for
transfer and here he's getting a
computer out that john will need on
mirror and putting it into a bag where
it can be efficiently transferred as
soon as we get docked did a fabulous job
getting everything ready so that when we
dock bang it was ready and everything
got over uh it was just super
that bright star that you see in the
center of the
optical site there is the mirror station
and at this point we're about two miles
away
and we're going to show you just a
couple time slices here
now we're about
a mile away
now we're getting to about 600 feet
and this is how we had the cockpit laid
out terry was uh in the front and he was
doing the mid-course burns
jay had the master checklist
and then tom was doing the handheld
laser
and carl was working the camera as well
john was our communicator
and that left me free to do a little bit
of flying and what you can see here are
the ford reaction control jets uh firing
as we're approaching the mirror station
this is approximately 170 feet as we're
continuing to close and you can
you can see the whole mirror station at
that point
shannon's eye view of us on our approach
here we're about 10 feet and you can see
the docking module very well coming into
the the payload bay
this is a view out of our
truss camera that was located adjacent
to our docking system
and you can see that the closure is just
ever ever so slow it's uh
about a yard in in 30 seconds so you
almost can't walk that slowly
about this time tom is calling pedal
overlap and then when we get to two
inches we fire uh post contact thrusters
to just nudge the two vehicles together
so that we get uh
a hard docking
and there was great rejoicing
on the other side of the hatch too
and uh this is uh this is shannon in the
docking module uh
waiting expectantly for uh our hatch to
open here and uh bill is doing that
right now
and of course uh uh the mirror 22 crew
uh valeri and sasha and shannon are
are there on the other side waiting for
us
so bill goes to
shake valerie's hand and
gets
brought into the docking module here and
so
and this is a view from from their
camera on board mirror
and
of course it was it was a great just a
tremendous celebration meeting together
in
and space
course here's john and shannon
um
you know glad to be together uh again
after about a six-month
separation since they were training
together star city
and shannon had the traditional greeting
of bread and salt
it's a traditional russian greeting and
we celebrated together
well with mere hard docked to the
shuttle and the welcoming ceremonies
complete
it was time to go to work and we got uh
quite a bit of the transfer operations
done that first day this is terry and i
back in the space lab you can see one of
the large
russian pieces of hardware we were
bringing home already there occurs unit
we had two of those we also did for the
first time powered transfers where we
had uh scientific experiments under
power on shuttle that we powered down
and moved over to mir this is jay
one of two uh incubators that keep a
controlled temperature environment for a
different
several different varieties of samples
in those
took it over to the new module on mirror
perota and inserted it in a locker and
powered it up
during all of the transfer operations
and other activities shannon every day
we were there exercised for two hours
each day here on the treadmill and the
base block
and one of the final transfer items
which carl uh mentioned was the 350
pounds of russian food we had in the
heiress experiment
and this is uh just checking to make
sure we hadn't left any m before we
stowed the empty containers
now we'll take a quick look a quick tour
of uh mir this was my home for six
months now as you see we're going
through here we were going through the
docking module and now this is in uh
cristal
um you can see that there's lots of
ventilation tubes there's lots of wires
there's uh lots of equipment that's
stored there
and there's a bungee cord that sort of
helps you navigate back and forth
actually
oh well first we're going to stop off
here at the
greenhouse uh due to the slip i was
fortunate and was able to uh get this
started and it was really sort of neat
to see the wheat see it uh uh start to
grow it reminded me of oklahoma you know
where i used to live and uh
for the first time just before i left
the wheat was actually going to seed and
so for the first time in space we had
started with the seed and it had gone to
seed and so i think that's just
pretty neat
going on this is perota the new module
that came while i was there and it's
full of various scientific equipment as
you can see there's the glove box and it
just worked outstanding actually
everything that all the united states
equipment that was there in parody
worked really really well this chair
there in the middle is one of the french
experiments that came up on progress and
it's left there there's just lots of
equipment uh in mir there's german
equipment french equipment there's the
united states equipment and it's all
there and it's very difficult to find
places to store uh store stuff
in the back of proto you can see the bts
and the rest of the united states
experiments now this is uh the node
and everything joins up here and when
after proto came and then after a
progress claim uh yuri pointed out to me
that for the first time in the history
of the station of mir all the nodes were
occupied and that was a new record
that's what it was designed for and
that's how it uh
got set up
oh and this is inside soyuz which was
there and there's our founders in case
there was an emergency we could have
gotten into soyuz and
come home
and the soyuz is still there and it's
the return vehicle for valerian sasha
this is in the base block
and you can see the
table back there valerie's back there by
the table the table was sort of the
central place in mir and that's where
if you weren't working somewhere else
you sort of congregated there to talk
talk to the ground eat and do all the
various activities that
you have
and then
you could look the cosmonauts each had a
small
cabin on each side which is very nice
they could keep their personal things
there and then they had a little window
that they could look out
and this happens to be uh sasha's uh a
little cabin and the pictures of his
family he has a three-month-old son and
so he had his pictures hanging up there
and then all their personal equipment
their toothpaste and everything to be
kept in one place
and then the sleeping bag was hung up on
the wall and as you looked out the
window when the shuttle was there then
you could see the shuttle dock there
also in the base block was the ham radio
and uh
we used it
to talk many times we were coming over
houston you could talk to your family
and valerie and sasha also like to use
the ham radio a lot this is another view
in the base block going toward the
central post and valeri was
headed in that direction and you can see
the bungee cords that were stretched out
there that help you navigate back and
forth this is inspector john has just
moved in it was all nice and clean and
all picked up but then all the new stuff
got in there
and you can see uh i like to read and i
had lots of books i put them in bookcase
up there uh about halfway through the
flight and yuri came in he looked and he
said what are you doing i said well i
like to have my books out i like to look
at it makes me feel good and he said
well what's john going to think about
that and i said well he's not here
and this is the back end of spectre and
you can see
those are the big great things are two
cameras uh earth viewing cameras but
then those white bags are all the
science equipment that we transferred
over for john they're all stacked up
there and then that's where i had all
the bags the science equipment stacked
up
uh to take over to
the shuttle
this is another one of the large storms
we saw where we were up there typhoon
yates unfortunately none of them were
around ksc on the 26th
they were they were just simply
spectacular if you could see those at
night uh you saw all kinds of lightning
we had the mirror crew over to the
shuttle for a dinner that we hosted uh
we treated them to some freeze-dried
local cajun barbecue
they enjoyed that very much
and it was time to go and unfortunately
we had our formal farewell ceremony say
goodbye to really two very close friends
of ours uh valeria and sasha and then we
said goodbye to the new mere crew member
and
it was a very emotional flight i'd have
to say it was emotional picking shannon
up and it was emotional saying goodbye
to john
if you look at the hatch that they're
closing you can see the docking target
on it and if you look carefully at a
still picture you can see the repair we
made to it while we were up there
this is the undocking early in the
morning there are springs in the docking
mechanism that push the two uh space
vehicles apart and then once you get two
feet away we activate the jets and
then bill gave some pulses to separate
us at a more rapid rate
this is a view out one of the
the trust camera we call it is an
auctioning
alternate docking camera
again there goes the docking module
away from us we drifted out to uh
about 150 feet and then bill and i
traded places so that i could do the fly
around and my hat's off to all the
ground people that arranged the timing
so we got pictures like this this is the
southern island of new zealand the
southern alps are on there
our geologists are particularly
interested in this area because it has a
lot of volcanoes and some geologic
faults
again the mirror in another attitude
during the fly around it seemed to
change colors depending on how close we
were to the terminator it was really
really beautiful
this is off the coast of australia
and that's that island that the mirror
is approaching right now is fraser
island and the town of bisbane is just
up the coast from that
here's the northeastern part of
australia again it's
one of the capes up there and what
you've got on the left side as we look
at is the great barrier reef and on the
right side of australia there is the
gulf of carpeteria
again we did the fly around to set up
shots for uh for the imax and again for
a mere photo survey
then it was really was time to go home
we finished up the science and the
packing in the back and closed the doors
i couldn't figure out why shannon wanted
to watch this but
then we turned our space shuttle into
the re-entry vehicle that it was
designed to be the pink out the windows
is the fire or the plasma that surrounds
the orbiter during re-entry that stuff
seems to reach a critical mass up around
the tail and you get the explosions like
that that give the orbiter a thump every
time you see an explosion that's sunrise
over my right shoulder
while we're in a row there
well we had
almost a 360 degree turn to get aligned
with runway 1-5 at the cape and it was a
right-hand turn all the way around so i
looked at nothing but instruments and
terry had a real nice view of the cape
uh got rolled out on final and uh it was
just the most perfect day you can
imagine to come back to florida just a
lo light breeze about 80 degrees and
bright sunshine
terry put the gear down there at 300
feet
doing the final flare here at about 50
feet we never did see the birds by the
way
and coming on in
and i'll tell you the orbiter just
handles like a dream
you can see uh
a little bit of oscillation as the drag
shoot comes out
nose
is cushioned onto the runway by the drag
shoot this reefing and then
dog on drag chute works so good that you
just don't even need any brakes hardly
at all and about 90 knots and just kind
of tested them just to make sure they
were working
and we stopped with about 3000 feet to
go there at kennedy space center
we had a surprise mystery guest welcome
us home
i'll tell you we were
just terrifically honored and proud to
be there to be with
shannon and welcome her home to be the
first to welcome her home i guess from
uh from space
president clinton and uh mr golden
we got a chance to give him one of uh
one of our crew symbols and uh crew hat
and of course a welcome home shannon
t-shirt