is
baby
and good morning discovery
good morning bill
yeah good morning kurt uh we hope you
like that one
thank you very much uh
looks like it's another beautiful day in
orbit and
we'll be up here shortly and go to work
go ahead for mim
on the oca i did try
repowering
with the scuzzy removed and the
mod was cuz he removed and the system
powers up fine
when i insert the scuzzy
and try to
do that it just locks the system up
the first time i did it there was no
trouble at all but all the other times
it seems to lock up all the time
your mother is still in elizabethtown i
understand and you have one son your
family must be very proud
of what you've accomplished
well they're very proud but you know how
moms are when you do things that
that happen every few years and
so she gets very excited but then she
gets uh she's ready for me to come back
home whenever i can get a chance
sir so you're flying this ship what are
your duties
well actually i'm responsible for making
sure the mission goes um
goes okay you know before we fly we have
to train and get organized and prepare
so that's a large part of it by the time
we get up in space here everyone's very
well prepared and i hardly really don't
have to do much everyone knows their job
and uh and they're very very uh
professional so we we actually get up
here and we each have our duties and we
follow our the plan that we have each
day and and it makes my job really easy
your main mission is to study the uh
depletion of the earth's ozone layer and
here in charlotte we hear a lot about
ozone alert
and trouble in the earth's atmosphere
can you see that from your vantage point
can you see over north carolina for
example what the ozone looks like
well actually nancy we can't really see
the ozone or um
or anything any of the chemicals that
we're really looking for what we can see
from space and from the shuttle
with our naked eyes that is is we can we
can see some city smog
sometimes when you have a big high
pressure area over an area you wind up
seeing a lot of haze and
it kind of looks like smoke
smog
but uh the only other things we can
really see from space with your naked
eyes we can see some rivers and streams
that
flow into the ocean which uh
it's not really pollution but it's the
sediments and things that
are caused by rain and different
erosions
we can see those things
and
if you have a volcano that erupts you
can see all the plume and those kind of
smoke and debris and
things like that in the atmosphere what
effect do you hope your mission uh the
mars pathfinder the increased
interest among americans in space is
going to have on the future of the space
program
well i think it's going to have a great
effect the uh
the space program we've been doing
things that are fantastic for many years
and unfortunately not everyone around
the world hears about what we do so with
the
the mir program going on the space
station our international space station
which is coming here in a year or so
and the uh the mars pathfinder all those
things are very very
things that we're kind of doing uh all
the time with nasa and it's nice now the
general public can see what we're doing
so we're very very proud of all those
things and we're going to continue to do
those kind of things in the future
you mentioned the international space
station the future international space
station i understand you're going to be
testing this japanese-made robotic arm
for possible use on this space station
later on what will this arm do
well actually as you know we have a
canadian arm on board it's a it's a
relatively long arm it's about the
length of our payload bay about about 60
feet and it's used primarily for
deploying payloads and uh and grabbing
payloads the small firearm that we're
testing on this flight and we call it
mfd because manipulator flight
demonstration
uh that small firearm will be at the end
of a long arm similar to the big one we
have and it will be able to say replace
things on orbit without going outside
you just do it by the robotic arm it can
open doors undo bolts and we can replace
things called r o r u's orbital
replacement units or maybe change out
payloads that are sitting out on the
kind of the back porch of the space
station
out where
we can't reach them without going eva or
extra vehicular activity
and we can use the robot arm just to
reach out and grab them and put them
maybe inside an airlock and uh and that
way we can bring them back home
tell us a little bit more about the
status of this mission uh in general
your primary mission is to check out the
ozone level what kind of shape is
earth's ozone level in
well miriam uh
you know that's kind of hard for me to
say i'm not a scientist for the
atmosphere but
back in
94 i flew an sts-66 and we had a similar
satellite it was crystal spawn number
one
and we deployed it and it gathered a lot
of data on the upper atmosphere on the
ozone and all the chemicals in the upper
atmosphere and this is the second flight
of the crystal spas
and they're looking for even more data
to cover more the polar regions of the
world which uh sts-66 could not cover so
yesterday was a very busy day for us we
deployed chris's spas
and it's well on its way now collecting
data of the earth
and then you'll just bring it back in
this is a very crowded flight 24
payloads a lot of scientific experiments
to conduct in all and in general is that
where you see the future of this shuttle
program moving towards just as a
platform for scientific experiments
well miriam the shuttle is a very
versatile uh machine it's amazing what
we can do
obviously we can take things up and
deploy things and bring them back which
we're going to do on this flight but
also as you mentioned we have many many
different payloads and activities we
range from deploying the crystal
satellite to study the earth's
atmosphere we have many experiments that
are designed to test equipment and
design equipment for the future space
station how it's going to be developed
deployed and operated we also have
astronomy on board we're going to be
looking at the hellbop comet and also we
have a bridge structure in the payload
bay called ieh extreme uh uv hitchhiker
and it's going to be gathering data on
some of the uh
items that are out in the uh in the
space and deep space so we have quite a
variety
for this mission and that doesn't really
count all the little things in the mid
deck
and other things are in the paler bay
that that aren't are prime
do you feel perfectly safe
out there
i think a little garbage there do we
feel safe up here i think the answer
there is definitely yes
we have a great team of folks on the
ground supporting us
they're watching over us whatever we're
doing
they have a lot more data than we do so
they have a better insight of the health
of the vehicle but uh we go through a
lot of training on the ground to prepare
us for
almost any malfunction that could happen
in the orbiter and
that's one of the good things about
flying is you don't have to go back to
the simulator and do more training
you're up on orbit doing the real thing