welcome to the sts 30 post flight crew
press conference
our time is somewhat limited today as we
have a press conference planned with
admiral truly in washington at 2 p.m
eastern daylight time
but first things first we're here to
talk about
shuttle mission sts-30 and the
successful dispatch of magellan on my
right the crew of atlantis dave walker
ron graby
mark lee
norm and mary cleave
captain
we have a film that we put together with
the help of the
real good tv and movie folks
here at jsc
starts with our traditional nasa logo
here we are getting ready to go out to
the pad in our
launch escape suits which are relatively
comfortable at this point because
they're been cooled down pretty well
nice day it was wonderful to see so many
folks there to see us off
and we had a very pleasant trip out to
the pad
here we're picking up with the launch
sequence as a result of our first scrub
the attitude in the cockpit was actually
relatively relaxed of course there's a
limit to how relaxed you can be when
someone lights off that big torch
beneath you
there's the orbiter going by the launch
tower
clearing the tower
see the orbiter or the vehicle roll to
place us in a heads down attitude and to
lock to align the vehicle and the proper
azimuth for its ascent phase here's some
a sequence
continuing on up in first stage
as dave mentioned we were wearing the
launch escape suits this time around
they provided a little more acoustic
insulation and it seemed a little
quieter to me than my first flight i
think that was shared by the other crew
members that had compared it to previous
launches
the next sequence will be the ius deploy
once you get on orbit we got the payload
bay doors open and we took a good look
at magellan it was good to see that it
was in the same pristine condition as
when we took off we started the
elevation procedures for the deploy and
inside once we got on orbit we had to
reconfigure a number of systems for
on-orbit operations
dave reaching back to one of the
overhead panels and norm helping them
out and shortly after that we start into
the procedures that we use to deploy
the ius principally it's the
the panel in back of me and over to the
right
of norm once we elevate it up to 29
degrees and then on up to 52 degrees for
the deploy we went ahead and threw the
switch and sent magellan on its way
it comes out of the payload bay at about
half a foot per second and during the
first minute we just sit there and watch
it leave the orbiter bay we're in free
drift as far as the shuttle is concerned
and the way it is deployed as you know
is a super zip it's a mechanical or a
metal band around the ios that is
separated and several springs send it
from the payload bay
ius here
it's flowing it's it's a very very
reliable upper stage we used it several
times and it put magellan on its
trajectory
the attitude was good it was when three
meters per second of where they said it
was going to be which is pretty
remarkable performance so it's been a
real workhorse of the space program
especially return to flight after
challenger and right about this time
you'll see the rate pickup of the
payload it's when we put a minus x burn
in
to the
orbiter it separates us from the payload
and that's a last maneuver that we do
until 15 minutes after deploy when we go
ahead and do our separation from the ius
this is a shot taking out the overhead
window a close-up view of ius it's about
four to five hundred feet away when we
finally do our burn it's about a
thousand to fifteen hundred feet away
and this is the the business end of the
ius we're looking at
right here inside the gold insulation is
the ios solid rocket motor
and this is when the solar rays deployed
they deployed 10 minutes after
the ius was deployed
in connection with the rcs system on ios
being activated
and this is a nice shot we got we
initially thought that venus was going
to be too close to the sun for us to
even see but that we didn't realize till
we got up there and followed several
times after sunset we could see uh venus
trailing the sun at the terminator so we
got a picture of venus uh sunset and
down in the lower portion you see some
of the clouds the
thunderheads that had built up
we had a mid deck experiment called a
fluid experiment apparatus which you can
see here my hands are inside of this
it's a little furnace we were growing
indium crystals
it was really an excellent mid deck for
us
to work on we changed out samples and
actually interacted with the science
here's an example of crystal
the rougher
section to the right was
done at a lower temperature than this
striated section which was melted at a
higher temperature so by adjusting the
wattage we could adjust the temperature
at which
this indium was being melted if you get
it too high it'll break if you get it
too low it doesn't melt through so it's
sort of touching and actually the
wattage was different on orbit than it
was
on the ground by about 10 watts
we controlled it with our little
experiment computer which worked great
different floppy disks for each
experimental run
we perform a number of medical
experiments each flight
this shows mark getting censored up for
one such experiment which looked at some
physiologic parameters i believe like
heart rate and that sort of thing
and in this scene you see mark and i
getting ready for a pre-breathe when we
do space walks to avoid bends we have to
breathe pure oxygen for a while mark and
i were the space walk crew members if we
had to do something like that
and for operational reasons to shorten
up that pre-breathe
we like to lower the cabin pressure to
10.2 psi and we plan to do that on
future flights so to test all of that
out and see how the cabin behaved
we donned the helmets in the cabin and
we actually did the one hour pre-breathe
as the cabin pressure was being lowered
from the normal 14.7 down to 10.2 psi
and i'm over there checking out and
making sure that our oxygen is actually
on we also have laptop computers you can
see one of the ones we carry here the
pgsc and you can see what that screen
looks like they're very useful for
experiments and for keeping track of
where we are around the world for earth
observation purposes
this sequence tip picks up with some of
the typical on-orbit operations this is
me in the pilot seat checking out some
systems is in conjunction with the
depressurization to 10.2 psi
cabin pressure that norm talked about
here's mary at the overhead windows this
is our primary vantage point for earth
observation photography
here's some pictures of some
thunderstorms approaching sunset one of
the experiments we had on board
dealt with the photography of lightning
and here we are getting ready to set
ourselves up for that here are some
lightning flashes as seen by some of the
cameras in the payload bay there's a
nice one coming up here shortly
there it is there's a rather large
lightning discharge
back to pick to flight deck operations
this time we're entering a maneuver
to put the shuttle in a new viewing
attitude here's a norm in back of me
entering some data into the onboard
computer
the portable computer that is
mary again at the app station with one
of our 70 millimeter cameras
and then a little example of some of the
earth obs these are irrigation fields
circular irrigation fields in saudi
arabia
there are hundreds of these
and some of these are very very large
the diameter getting up to two to three
kilometers across they're very prominent
when viewed from low earth orbit
we are coming across baja california
sun glint in the sea of cortez
and panning down to the southern tip
we all got a chance to take a lot of
photography on this mission and that's a
lot of fun to do and in addition it's
useful to a lot of folks
geologists people who do cartography and
ocean oceanographers for the two
floridians on board dave and myself we
love this shot
you can see alligator point in
tallahassee there for a while some of my
old stomping grounds
and panning down the peninsula
things are just very prominent lake
okeechobee is very prominent there you
can see all of the miami area and that's
a huge area these days with nearly 12
million people that the state has
in addition to the motion pictures
obviously we took a lot of still photos
and while this is a camera view the fact
is that with the naked eye you can see
almost everything that you can see in
this view this is a picture of the cape
and you can see the shuttle landing
facility the two launch pads including
the one from which we launched just a
few days before the florida keys just a
beautiful view
and you can certainly see the metroplex
area there the metropolitan area of
miami and of course lake okeechobee
coming into view
i really as a floridian love these kind
of pictures and we had it seemed like
all the passes we had over florida
during the mission were like this very
few clouds and it's almost like looking
at a map except you don't see any of the
boundary lines as we go to the east of
course we come to
the bahamas
a nice place for a post flight trip
we uh sort of shared doing the the food
cooking duties that whoever got
hungry first seemed to be the person
would end up cooking uh with a galley on
board i didn't have one the last one the
galley on board it made it
an awful lot easier and faster to get
meals prepared
but it's actually a lot easier in zero g
going up the stairs in one g you have to
be careful and take the trays one at a
time you can just grab them and float up
in zero g and we usually ate our meals
up on the flight deck
here's mark
with his vhs or viroqua high school
t-shirt on her
sports shirt
with a piece of beef jerky just enjoying
zero g mark it was mark's first flight
he's a rookie and he really had a good
time you could tell he was really
enjoying being weightless
he kept playing with his food i'm sure
his mother would want him to do that but
he kept playing with his food
and now you can see here all the bags
that's re-entry morning that's all of
our suits
re-entry escape gear that was packaged
up in these bags before we unpacked them
you can see it took up a lot of space
down here
a lot of times at work i feel like i'm
running around in circles and so i tried
actually running around in circles and
it worked up there and it was a lot of
fun
there's something about zero g that
makes even adults regress we were always
told not to play with our food but the
fact is you can get such interesting
effects now the fish crackers that we
have there in the plastic bag are
primarily for eating
but interestingly
in that plastic bag they really almost
did look like a pack of
live or a school of live fish
ultimately however you have to remember
that they're there primarily to eat
and there go a school of them and just
like predator fish
you can't resist
and then you've got the problem of
course of getting those things out of
the air before they drift off
and we'll introduce the crew ron gravy
and then having some difficulty getting
through there as he's tangled up in all
the wires and cords that inevitably seem
to be in the way
mark lee
and i think i'm next here
and i get a little tangled up in the
cords as well
but there's always someone there to grab
you if you do get lost in space
and in our persona as finn and olay we
try to outdo uh hans and franz with
their little girly legs and do our pump
you up act and now mary plead
nice aerobatics thanks and dave
okay we thought that our last day on
orbit would be a pretty easy day we're
going to do some more crew movie and
earth obs type of
video work but we ended up changing out
the computer and this is a real good
shot in the avionics bay where we had to
work it was pretty type of being in zero
g
there were no real pressure points so it
was pretty easy to stay in there for a
couple hours and do the work one of the
biggest problems is housekeeping as we
brought out each one of the wire bundles
we made sure that it was marked
correctly
mary and i both checked them to make
sure that
we when we put it back together
we put it back right it would have been
pretty embarrassing if we would have got
the right cables hooked up
and so we marked everything we put it in
bags all the screws and bolts float
around so we had to we had to make sure
that we kept track of all of those and
once we got it back in mary's showing
here torquing down uh the bolts each one
of the bolts has specifications this was
100 inch pounds that we had to do
these two and there are a couple other
eye bolts that we had to go to 30 inch
pounds
once they were in place then we hooked
up all the electrical connectors we
powered it up and the computer worked
great
after getting the computer replaced we
got a good night's sleep got up the next
day suited up to come home
this is just a little demo of how that
can be done
and it's fairly easy to get in and out
of the suit in zero gravity although it
isn't all that comfortable to wear
and then we started downhill on schedule
this is a picture of plasma interaction
around the orbiter which mark was able
to get with the camcorder some
spectacular photography there of the
plasma sheath discharging
this is pretty rare photos then
you can see out the window again with
the same camcorder
the earth horizon as we do the roll
maneuvers that allow us to
guide ourselves down the reentry track
all of this went very smoothly there's a
little bit of
high mock buffet and you can see that
reflected in the slight
shaking
of the camera
i said i said mark actually i think mary
was taking all of these
mark took the photos uphill
and then finally back at edwards
ron flew a little bit after we went
subsonic and then i took it for the
landing
it was very smooth all the way down
until we got close
uh relatively close the last few
thousand feet when the turbulence and
the crosswinds which we had expected
since we were trying to get a crosswind
developmental test objective done
became
obvious the orbiter flies very well
through that sort of conditions here's
another picture out the side window
as we come down
we
had no difficulty
approaching the runway
some mild compensation for the crosswind
and then as you'll see lands pretty
smoothly
ron is going to do the most important
job
that he has to do in the flight here in
just a second which is to lower the
landing gear
which we're very appreciative
because we switched runways late in the
game we don't have as good a
photographic coverage of the landing as
we usually do but it's still adequate to
see that the orbiter's flying well
on touchdown the crosswind becomes more
evident and requires more compensation
but still it's quite safely flyable
we had a
smooth soft touchdown a little bit of
drift left and then back to the center
line
rolled out about 10 000 feet
and stopped
without difficulty
and after having gotten out of our
launch escape suits and cleaned up a
little bit we're ready to come back to
earth
where uh
dale myers and dick truly were waiting
to greet us and where we could take a
look at the orbiter and make sure that
it was indeed in as good a shape as we
had hoped looked fine
and we were happy to be back
after what was very exciting although to
our mind too short of flight we would
have been happy to to stay longer
and we'll be happy to go back when the
next opportunity presents itself