good morning and welcome to the STS 31
post flight crew press conference our
crew of five has about 20 minutes of
film and twenty six or seven slides with
which to share their unique and rare
perspective of this mission and with
that I'll turn it right over to crew
commander Lauren Schreiber thank you
Jeff first of all let me welcome
everybody here this morning in the room
and around the country who's listening
in if it hasn't been apparent so far in
all of our discussions we really enjoyed
flying this mission and we believe that
we had a very successful mission overall
we did exactly what the mission set out
to do and it was just unbelievable end
to end and what we tried to do
throughout was document as best we could
what was actually taking place at the
time we were doing it and that's what we
want to do this morning then is update
everybody by means of a film that we put
together and also show you some slides
after that before we get into that
though in case nobody anybody does not
know the rest of the crew members on my
right is Charlie Bolden a pilot and just
did just a little bit of everything on
board to shuttle while we were up there
and we'll we'll have words from him as
the movie goes on Bruce McCandless ms1
he was our HST expert on on all of its
systems and also of course ev1 and
almost the guy to open the hatch and go
outside and almost crank open the second
solar array dr. Steve Hawley next to him
he was our RMS operator ms2 going up
hill and during entry and did an
excellent job of course of maneuvering
the HST on the end of the magic wand so
to speak and in Kathy Sullivan ms3 for
the flight again also ev2 and
just about header hand on the airlock
depressed dial to go that extra five psi
to get down the vacuum for that almost
EV a that we did with that and in order
not to take up too much time so that we
have time for your questions at the end
let's go ahead and get started with the
film will will be narrating as we go and
one thing I would like you to try to pay
attention to as the film unravels is the
rather continuous pictures of the earth
and the background and this is some of
the beautiful sceneries that we were
seeing always in the background whenever
you look outside and it's daylight some
of the very beautiful pictures of the
earth as the rest of the events unfold
so why don't we go ahead and roll that
film this of course are a mission patch
and we like it a lot we think it told a
story all of its own very appropriate
for the flight this is the morning of
launch going through all of our suit up
drill and each one of us then go through
a pressure check a suit integrity check
and you see that in progress here for
all five of this sort of in turn
shooting up has added a little time to
the mornings events so we split the crew
two and then three so that we can all
arrive at a common state of readiness
and walk out together as you see here
the trip to the launch pads relatively
quick it was dark as you could all see
you get out there and I think you've
heard it said by other crew members that
you get out there and there's a little
bit different on launch morning because
the vehicle seems to be alive this is
actually the main engine start which
occurs roughly six to seven seconds
before the liftoff and then the solid
rocket boosters ignite on board this
time I think I was a little bit more
sensitized everything I actually felt
the main engine ignition inside and you
could feel the twang of the vehicle and
everybody feels the solid rocket
boosters ignite because you get lots
more noise and vibration and with the
suits which none of us had worn before
you actually end up bouncing around
inside this little environment of your
own our asset was pretty much a normal
what we call direct insertion where we
actually did not do a owns or an orbital
maneuvering system one burn we just
allowed ourselves to glide on up to
basically a 331 by 27 or forty seven
nautical mile orbit before we did our
insertion burn the main engine cutoff
velocity was a little bit faster than we
normally see roughly 26,000 feet per
second and the most impressive thing to
me was the way we could not see the
earth after mikko as you all know our
altitude was unique for the shuttle
program we went to 330 miles circular
orbit it was it was truly noticeable and
impressive from onboard and we hope that
we were able to share some of that with
you on the downlink television first
thing every crew does is get the orbiter
configured for being on orbit and if I
think particular concern to our crew was
the number of activities that we had to
accomplish on flight day one including
checking out the RMS which you see us
doing here we do that early in the
flight of course because if there were
failures with the arm we would have over
night and the next morning to try to
figure out what the impact would
on the Hubble Space Telescope deploy
operations in our case the arm worked
beautifully and there were no problems
at all with rms check out and we got
that done on time on flight day one and
the other major activity that was going
on at that time was doing all the
preparatory work for the potential
spacewalk the next day what you're
seeing here is the power erratic tool
which is a device produced by the
Goddard Space Flight Center adapted
specifically to work on the Space
Telescope both the maintenance and
repair missions and for deploying the
solar arrays which if done manually
required 120 full turns and in suited
tests underwater it proven to be fairly
fatiguing this unit has its own internal
battery a high-performance electric
motor and little microprocessor
controller to control the speed the
torque and the number of turns per
trigger setting or per trigger squeeze
here you see some additional
configuration of tools of going into the
airlock in preparation for the EBA that
almost was in addition to configuring
the airlock with about a dozen tools
most of which were unique to the HST
possible deployment asks we had to
conduct a pre breathe through deuce the
cabin pressure and check out all three
of the spacesuits we had we had an upper
torso assembly which includes all the
life-support systems and computer
monitoring systems on the suit as a
spare unit in the event that either of
the primary suits for brucer I had
developed a problem all in all it took
Bruce and I the lion's share of our time
on flight day one and a goodly measure
of Charlie's time Charlie was always the
critical resource being split through
the RMS operations and the EBA early in
the morning on flight day 2 which was
actually less than 24 hours after launch
we were given a go for HST deploy
operations and that meant that I was go
to uncrate all the RMS and move it over
and grapple the space telescope in the
bay which you see here we're trying to
convey a sense I think of how big the
space telescope is
and the fact that the aperture door is
bright and shiny and it sits right in
front of the windows and all of that as
I had described in the pre-flight press
conference was of some concern to me
being able to see to do the task it was
about as difficult as as we had expected
and and the views as you can see here
out the window certainly degrade rapidly
as the telescope begins to come out of
the bay Charlie was very helpful at
talking me through the deploy operations
with the arm particularly as I mentioned
down low in the Bay where the clearances
are fairly small and you're trying to go
go slowly if you look carefully through
the window I think you'll be able to see
the rate at which we were trying to move
the HST up out of the bay slow is is
good when you have two very large
vehicles very close together and as you
know it took a little bit longer on
orbit to do that task then we had
simulated on the ground and I think that
that that's probably to be expected
given the the fact that we weren't
really the pacing item in the deploy
sequence anyway and we wanted to make
sure that the job was done properly
there are a number of coordinated
activities that actually need to take
place it isn't just Charlie and me
operating the arm but Lauren has to
position the vehicle the orbiter vehicle
in the proper attitude so that the Sun
shines on the proper part of the Space
Telescope and and he had to make a
couple of different maneuvers in
addition to manually holding the the
orbiters attitude near where it wanted
to be while the the arm and the
telescope or emotion we had a number of
constraints governing how the orbiter
could move when the telescope was
unbirth and when it was in motion and he
had to manage all of that very carefully
we did find that this manual control of
the orbiter using certain app settings
or digital auto pilot work very well and
have recommended that that be highly
considered as a mode of orbiter control
and large payloads like this after Steve
lifted
the telescope clear of the bay he went
through a number of maneuvers the end
result of which was getting the the
bottom or the base end of the telescope
pointing forward and after Lauren
oriented the orbiter these fish was
pointing toward the Sun the solar array
booms were folded up 90 degrees and as
you see here the solar array panels were
enrolled you have to watch very closely
because this is a rather slow process
taking on the order of six minutes to
fully unreal these sets of solar array
panels there are five separate solar
panel assemblies on each side of the
center drum two arrays on the entire
telescope the set that you see here the
plus v2 solar array deployed very nicely
as I'm sure you're aware later on there
were some difficulties deploying the
minus v2 array which led Kathy and
myself to finish the sitting up process
and ultimately to get into the airlock
depressurized the airlock 25 pounds per
square inch or approximately half the
cabin pressure and to stand by just
inches away from the hatch and from the
depressed valve for about two hours
until telescope separation and released
from the orbiter was complete and until
Steve had completed birthing the RMS
here you see the plus v2 array fully
deployed these arrays are a contribution
from the European Space Agency along
with the faint object camera and
represent fifteen to twenty percent of
their participation in the program we at
the solar array that had been giving us
trouble was finally unfurled properly we
actually didn't have very much time
until the release opportunity as I
recall it was around 30 minutes or so so
through a number of activities that
Lauren and I had to do with Charlie's
helped and Charlie was kind of going
back and forth between the deck and the
mid-deck throughout the day we noticed
that one of the surprises was the amount
of clearance between the arm and the
solar array at separation it was a
little bit less
we had been led to expect from the
simulations that we have performed on
the ground however the control of the
arm was very precise and the control of
the orbiter at separation was very
precise and we had no concerns about
about contacting the arm with the solar
ray but it was something that Lord and I
kept a very close eye on what you're
saying in this scene is actually the
Space Telescope after release as we are
flying over the western coast of Peru
actually crossing the Andes Mountains
and that to me was pretty spectacular
from a visual sense some of the
information that we learned on this
flight only hope to pass on to whichever
crew is selected to do maintenance
repair missions on the HST it's the fact
that the HST is highly visible I guess
you would expect that just because of
the way it's it's configured with
reflecting thermal blankets and the big
solar arrays also providing a lot of
reflecting surface area we can see it
for a long time of course post-release
in addition we found throughout the
flight every terminator we would be able
to see the HST reflecting sunlight even
at a distance of greater than 40 miles
that was a little bit of a surprise of
course as Bruce and Kathy can describe
this is not the end of anything but the
beginning of the lifetime of the
telescope and and a lot of the work that
they did on this flight will will come
back to have produced results years from
now as the maintenance missions are our
lives to service the telescope and keep
it an operational observatory for years
to come Stevens mentioned it is designed
for a 15 to 20 year lifetime as an
observatory facility with planned visits
roughly every five years to replace
those components which are known to
degrade such as the batteries and the
solar arrays to replace anything that
fails and also to provide the
opportunity for exchanging scientific
instruments as the data which comes back
from the current set of five instruments
is analyzed and perhaps reveals new
pathways to explore I talked with the
folks in the Space Telescope operation
control
Center this morning they have rearranged
some elements of the checkout bringing
the scientific instrument check out
forward and working on some minor
problems in the pointing and control
system but all in all they feel like
they're about on schedule in terms of
the amount of check out that's required
here you see me looking at the protein
crystal growth experiment this is a
secondary payload from the university of
alabama in birmingham and in this close
up shot chamber of c3 you can see some
crystals of carboxyl ester hydrolysis
which was one of the compounds the idea
here is to create large defect free
crystals in zero gravity that can be
used under x-ray analysis to reveal the
exact structure of the protein and once
the structure has been revealed you can
tailor anybody's or vaccines or other
biological agents and then produce those
to yield the desired effect unlike
zero-g electrophoresis where we were
attempting to manufacturers commercial
quantities of substances this is just
designed to discover the structure and
do the rest work on the ground this is
one of the other secondary experiments
we had it was conceived of by a student
at a high school at the time in Utah and
sponsored by a corporation out there
what you see are three different views
the center one is the the actual
electrical arc being struck and the two
others are mirror views and the idea was
to look at what affects driving an arc
and affecting with outside magnetic
fields would have in zero-g we carried
two imax cameras one was the in cabin
camera that you see kathy and me trying
to get reloaded here the other was the
imax cargo bay camera which we have not
seen any of the film yet but hopefully
we'll see in another week or two there's
one of our élevage dad's fishing i was
obligated to make sure i got a few good
shots of some key places in baja
california for my father but we also
tried to put some of the spectacular
views that we had on film
to give you a sense of both the scale of
v view and the rate of passage which is
a little slower of course at this
altitude than lower flights in some of
the stills which we'll get to later you
may get a better appreciation of this
here you're over central Mexico the two
bright dots at the upper center portion
of the frame are the two large volcanoes
just southeast of Mexico City and if you
strain a little bit just up into the
left of those volcanoes you may see a
slightly lighter gray or patch of ground
and that is in fact the urban area of
mexico city itself it was easy to have
all of Mexico literally from the
California Mexico border to the Gulf
Coast and on up to houston in your field
of view at one time from our altitude
which was very spectacular in fact as I
mentioned perhaps during the flight one
pass roughly in this location going to
the east we were puzzled to see a lake
worried we didn't recognize any lake
should be on thinking about it Lauren
realized that it was like Michigan that
we were seeing and in fact we later saw
a lake area and Lake Ontario being able
to see entirely across the north-south
width of the United States from over the
Gulf of Mexico and here you're seeing
across almost all of South America from
just slightly east of the crest of the
Andes out to the coast by Rio de Janeiro
this was one of the least popular
experiments aboard I wondered whether
anyone would still speak to me after
this if I hadn't already been hit this
is something like 8 TB tests at once
there's a certain toxin on each one of
those sets of times and the idea is to
determine whether the body's response to
immune system response varies at all in
zero-g some of the body's immune
response of course is governed by the
blood system and another level of it is
controlled by the cellular structure of
the body and the objective of this
experiment specifically was to look at
cell-mediated immune response and see if
one mission specialist could survive
administering it to two other people on
the day before entry we go through a
series of tests that we call flight
control system or FCS check out what
Lauren Steve and I were doing here was
actually going through
various tests of the hydraulic system
with the auxiliary power unit running
actually firing the RCS Jets to make
sure they all operated properly and make
sure that all the systems on board were
going to be good or go for the entry day
rfcs check out when very very smoothly
with only very insignificant anomalies
which we had seen before in previous
flight this is a we were trying to get
you some lightning and you can see it
over in the left to the left of the
earth slim there that's one of the more
spectacular scenes of Natan is the
lightning all over the earth just
unbelievable when you when you get a
chance to see it this is later in entry
then some about Mach 6 taken from a
tracking camera out at Vandenberg we
have been doing several air opt is on
the way in all the way through entry to
gather aerodynamic data to try to expand
the flight envelope of the shuttle
slightly this is a scene here of we're
rolling on the hack and coming around
heading alignment circle you can see the
Sun on the very bottom of the wing there
that that Sun angle presented somewhat
of a problem to Charlie and I as we flew
right into it trying to turn on to the
alignment circle and it wasn't until we
got more than half way around the circle
that we finally had the Sun out of our
eyes hard to read inside and in
transition to outside I was fortunate
that Lauren is a real gracious soul in
the pilot is kind of a misnomer you're a
co-pilot but Lauren gave me an
opportunity to fly the vehicle a little
bit as we went subsonic and I thought it
performed amazingly will we've just come
through the inner glide slope there and
once you start to pull the nose up of
course you're losing all the precious
airspeed that you had preserved at that
point charlie lower to gear about 300
feet above the ground and we just came
on in establishing attitude and kind of
hold it to the landing we had been sort
of on-again off-again for
that day for the wind situation out at
Edwards as you probably recall and we
seem to run out of a hair speed a little
bit quicker than normal that I'm used to
in the Sta but the shuttle does have a
lot of reserve capability there so
overall the landing went very smoothly
in the nose wheel d rotation rate
continued to be very slow for the
entirety rotation we also flew the new
carbon brakes for the shuttle program
for the first time those brakes turned
out to work very well they're very
smooth and very positive I think
there'll be a great asset to the program
as we continue to fly those on other
vehicles now and then look toward
returning to KSC for landing and of
course I planned that stop exactly in
front of the tower with this camera in
mind so we could get a new slant on
things and we did Oh 30 or 40 minutes
worth of post landing cleanup switches
and reconfiguring and then we're ready
to get out of the inside fairly cool
outside that day it was about 44 45
degrees windchill factor so we stayed
inside the suits we had sent along the
regular blue flight suits that we
thought we were going to get into but as
Lauren mentioned the wind chill factor
made it desirous to just a combination
of your heat inside the suit and the
coolness of the desert air out there
made it perfect
you