tell me
good morning endeavor your wake up music
this morning is a special message for
the plt
good morning p.r also and thank you very
much
this is mission control houston on board
endeavor the six-member crew is awake
now
their wake-up music this morning
gloria estefan's version of hold me for
pilot kurt brown
a greeting from his fiancee
and andy the ps says to tell you thanks
uh
all your words have been very helpful in
describing this since you have a view of
these crystals that we don't have here
on the ground
even with the video that we get
and they really appreciate all the
details that you've been giving them
abc this is houston please call
endeavor for a voice check
hello endeavor this is abc do you hear
me
and we're yes to you from about 180
miles up in space
just crossing over central america right
now
and with me i have uh
three of the crew members and three of
the six crew members
on endeavor
um
there's uh dan burch from new york
and of course you know uh andy thomas
from uh
from south australia i'd just like to
tell you that we've had a very busy and
productive
five days on orbit here
and andy has just done an outstanding
tremendous job as payload commander for
all the experiments here
in the space hub that you see around us
and andy had a part in recording the
data for that and also a small
satellite test unit
which uh
and he also participated in uh data
takes on that
and the other part the major part uh
has been
microgravity science and
i wonder if you could tell us andy what
it was like flying over australia and in
particular over your home city
uh it was great we flew over south
australia about uh
20 minutes ago and it was the sun was
setting and
it was shining on
the gulf there and i could see
the outline of the coast and i could
make out the city of adelaide it was
really an amazing fight to fly over it
how much detail could you see
quite clearly
and i could see some of the coast
beaches quite clearly as a white line
we're about 180 miles up though so uh
it's hard to see and we're moving very
quickly too we can only had the view for
a couple of minutes before it was gone
with weightlessness in the in the cabin
there how difficult is it to move around
and uh is your boomerang safe
i see my boomerang
it stays somewhere where i can't get to
it
moving around is very easy
in fact it's a little bit too easy you
have to be careful because you can end
up uh moving too quickly and bouncing
into things
i will demonstrate behind you
well i understand you've just had your
breakfast uh what was on the nasa menu
this morning
uh i had
granola with blueberries uh some
scrambled eggs
a breakfast roll some juice and some
coffee i must say i'm
all right thank you very much andy
thomas it's been a pleasure to talk to
you we wish you bon voyage and we hope
to see you safe back on earth and
particularly in adelaide soon
thank you very much for the greetings
and my greetings to everyone in adelaide
and i look forward to visiting soon as
well
now
if you let go of the side there what
would happen would you float away
standby we'll demonstrate
try doing that
the third experiment uh
is the liquid thermal type experiment
and that is a basically an experiment
that is using
uh
liquid potassium
as a cooling fluid
basically in normal refrigerants on the
ground we use freon and freon is used in
refrigerators and air conditioning to
carry heat from where the work is being
done the excess heat it goes to an
evaporator uh gets cooled off and a
condensation coil and the heat is uh
dispelled but the transport medium is
primarily freon up here we're
experimenting with using liquid
potassium which may be more efficient uh
a more efficient carrier of
thermal energy away from hot sources
but right now we're going to talk and
say special greetings from westchester
and from yonkers we're saying hello to
younger native mario ronco it's good to
talk to you also we want to say that
cardinal hayes high school is giving you
a special hello as well mario when you
were a school boy were astronauts your
heroes who were your role models
and uh
when i was younger i had a couple of
role models actually several uh growing
up in the bronx of course uh mickey
mantle and joe dimaggio were a couple of
role models for me
and uh when i got a little bit older as
the space program started to take shape
uh of course uh alex shepard and john
glenn and yuri gagarin
when they first went into space uh i saw
those uh gentlemen go up
and uh saw the good work that nasa and
the scientists were doing and i was
quite excited by it and uh right then
and there i i made the decision uh that
i wanted to be an astronaut of course it
was until uh 35 or so years later that
it actually happened
i know that there are a number of
important experiments going on could one
of you and it makes no difference
actually who sort of addressed the issue
of which may be the most important if if
you can in fact prioritize them that way
yeah we have a variety of experiments in
a module we're carrying in the payload
bay
called a space hab module there's 12
experiments in there
perhaps the most significant ones are
crystal growth experiments which are
trying to develop
improved higher quality
crystal materials that can be used for
semiconductor applications such as
integrated circuits like you might use
in a computer in a home telephone in a
video camera
or a radio or some such uh instrument
like that
in addition we've been carrying uh
another payload out of the payload bay
we've carried an antenna structure which
we deployed on orbit and inflated with
gas to prove that you can make large
space structures with an inflation
principle and we've deployed another
small satellite which we're going to be
tracking in the following days to see
how well it stabilizes itself in orbit
so this plane carries a number of really
interesting experiments in space
technology and space science
which is the most important thing you're
doing in this particular mission
regarding that space station
the direct answer to that uh
question tom is
the the gain experiment or the gps
attitude and navigation experiment uh
that experiment uh is using uh the
global positioning system constellation
of satellites and their information to
determine the attitude of the space
shuttle we have inertial measuring units
which you asked about earlier on board
which would do that normally for us but
in the future we'd like to be able to
use gps
as a as a replacement or as an addition
to or as a supplement to those inertial
measuring units
if the information from this experiment
is accurate enough
then we don't have to carry as many
redundant imus on board we can we can
maybe get away with carrying one or two
instead of the tripoli redundant set
that we have and use the information
from gps so that translates to a weight
savings when you try to get something as
big as a space station into orbit in
several flights
you