oh
in the house
good morning discovery a little stevie
ray vaughan for stevie ray robinson
and mark that's what i call wake up
music we're all wide eyes
but still here now thanks a lot
and so are we down here
as steve uh as you're going into
observation 1-4 we'd like for you to
disconnect the j2 connector on the power
interface box and we'll see if that
helps
okay and
you see a decent image of the comment on
your screen right now is it just too
messy to see
no we've got a very good image
discovery houston we have the parameters
for an upcoming maneuver at 15 colon 3-0
when you're ready to copy
discovery houston just let you know that
the ground is about to initiate a fuel
cell purge and with that
the planning shift is heading off and
wayne hale is here and
billy mack will be talking to you and
for us it was rather exciting to have
the opportunity
to talk to you
at the beginning of your wake up and
we'll do it some more
okay mark uh we copy that we appreciate
all y'all's work through the night to
replay our days i know we have some busy
days and y'all go through a lot of
efforts with the fao and
all the different payloads to try to get
it all organized and we sure do
appreciate that too bad we don't get to
talk to you a little bit more before you
sign off but i know you're ready to go
home thank you
hello
i want to talk to biarni
hello mr prime minister how do you read
us we read new uh loud claire
i see you pretty well you know you're
seems to having fun you look pretty good
from up from here how we
look from where you are
well with this inclination we've gone
have many many passes over canada so far
we'll have many more and i've had a
fabulous look at
most parts of canada now good shots of
vancouver calgary and edmonton beautiful
uh view of montreal this morning
and maritimes a couple days ago so we've
had a great time
looking at canada from up here
good i'm very happy for you you have
been a very patient man you're a bit
like me you had to wait 14 years before
you managed to go there i had to wait 30
years to have the job i have right now
that's why you're leading us and i'm
just a follower i'm only halfway behind
you there
so uh
you're doing some pretty important
experiment uh
there for for us can you describe some
of it for
for other canadians who are watching
sure in fact the main experiments that
i'm involved in up here is testing what
we call the microgravity vibration
isolation mode
and this is a system that isolates
experiments fluid physics material
science experiments protein crystal
growth experiments of the type that
we're going to do on the space station
starting sometime after next year it
isolates them from the vibrations that
are
in the spacecraft itself
you spend a fair bit of effort getting
experiments into the nice environment
here in space to add to the kind of
things you can do at laps on the ground
and now this last little bit actually
just cleans the environment up for the
experiments uh just that last little
tweak to get it right down to the micro
g acceleration level
and i
understand that you had some uh
experiment with some students from
saskatchewan the other day
so was it all right yes there was 20
students that talked to me a day or two
ago and they had a
good set of questions all ready to go
and i enjoyed that very much
good then are you using canadarm
you know the our arm that
we see
being used in this trip so do you use
the one that
on district
yeah in fact we use the canada arm on
the very first day of the flight uh you
know a few hours after an orbit here to
launch the crystal spa satellite which
is co-orbiting with us about 40 miles
behind us right now and it's actually
doing a lot of measurements of the upper
atmosphere to better understand the
dynamics of the upper atmosphere and the
ozone
problem in the upper atmosphere
we will use it again towards the end of
the visor retrieve that and in between
we've used it on a couple other
experiments to assist those
well hey there's a great privilege for
me to be able to be up here representing
canada
and i've
enjoyed the work with the space agency
for a number of years getting up there
and i think it's a great privilege to uh
i'm very honored to be up here
representing canada and we do get a
chance to talk to marco now and again
mark i know now and again uh he's
actually uh the capcom on the planning
shift and so we typically get to say
speak a little bit to him in the evening
and sometimes early in the morning when
we get up and we get up basically around
two or three in the morning your time
so i wish you a very safe return and
you would say hello to your fellow uh
astronauts who are
americans and uh you know we're very
pleased to see a canadian with them and
we can work with the americans very well
uh
most of the time and i can say that i
know that the mic is open at this moment
well for sure in fact the experiments
that i'm doing here on the isolation
mount and the fluid physics experiments
we're doing on it are really all being
done in collaboration with our nasa
colleagues
and the work that i've been involved in
on the mere space station has also been
with the support of nasa so it's a
it's very good the working relationship
with nasa and i'm sure it'll continue
for the years to come as we get into the
space station era
so have a safe journey my friend
bonjour
thank you
astronaut steve robinson used the
special telescope uh to zoom in on hale
bop steve tell us about that first about
that telescope and what are we learning
about comet hail bob that was so
exciting to all of us when we saw it
from earth that uh we we couldn't learn
from down here
well john we think it's pretty exciting
too uh we have a small telescope that we
that is mounted not outside uh our crew
cabin here back in the payload bay but
right right in here right in this area
about uh 10 feet to my right there's a
window looking out the side hatch this
is the hatch that we climbed in the
shuttle with and this is a telescope
with about a seven inch uh diameter
mirror uh or lens that is and it
attaches to the side hatch and looks out
the window the telescope's about two and
a half feet long and just about the
diameter of the window we point the
whole shuttle we don't point just the
telescope we point the whole shuttle of
the comet
and then it has a very highly
intensified uh
ccd camera that has a digital camera on
the back of it
and it's enabled to look at the comet in
the ultraviolet spectrum and that is
something we cannot do from earth
because the atmosphere protects
us earthlings and everything on the
earth from the ultraviolet rays of the
sun
but it also keeps us from learning about
the ultraviolet spectrum of astronomical
bodies like the comet hail bob
we've got we've asked our viewers to
join in with questions and we've got a
great one from a 12 year old aaron
hendry sent us an email asking if hale
bop looks the same from up there as it
did from here on earth
eric that's an excellent question and
there's a question i had until about a
few days ago when i was able to see
hillbop through the telescope here now
one thing is back in march or so hillbop
was nearer to the earth and to the sun
and so we were able to see it more
brightly and it had a longer tail
uh now it's about twice as far away from
the sun as it was then so it's not as
bright the tail is not as big but still
it's it's relatively close to us
and
we can see it much more clearly from
space because the atmosphere doesn't
diffuse the light and also you don't
have to get up real early in the morning
like you do you're going around the
earth so many so so fast that you can
stay in bed to a reasonable time of day
i know you'll appreciate this eric
and
then you can get up and still see the
comment
thanks steve one of the main purposes of
this flight is to test the new japanese
robot arm i call it the mini arm it goes
out at the end of i guess the other
robot arm it would be attached to the
international space station someday to
repair and replace pieces of the new
international space station without
making astronauts like you go outside to
do it what do you think of the robot arm
in its operation so far any surprises
well john we've had a really
educational uh
experience in flying this arm for the
first time you're right this is the uh
the prototype for this small fine arm as
it's called it will go on the end of a
long
arm that will go on the japanese
experiment module when the international
space station is put together up to that
point so this is in a few years from now
and this is the flight test of the small
fine arms so it's quite dexterous in
other words it could do a lot of things
with this with its uh joints it's fairly
small it's only about
a meter and a half to two meters long
depending on how you stretch it out but
it has uh
six degrees of freedom in the joints in
other words you can move it around just
about like your arm it's almost hard to
talk about the arm without taking your
arm out and moving it around because
that's just about what you do with the
hand controllers
and uh
dan
and i have had a great time first of all
training for the flight we've gone to
the tokyo area twice to train on the
japanese hardware we have lots of
japanese software and hardware here in
houston or down in houston that we've
trained on for many months and finally
it's been a really great experience to
come up and test the space hardware
that's going to be
built
in in final form for the international
space station in a couple years and let
me just say that we've learned a lot
about the arm yes a couple of surprises
but in general it's really worked great
a fine piece of engineering this viewer
wants to know what kind of philosophical
thoughts come to mind when you're in
space maybe thoughts that wouldn't come
to mind when you're down here on earth
that's an easy one john lots of them do
when you look out the window the first
time you look out there
to me the first thing that really
occurred to me was how small each of us
humans really are the heavens
are very large they're huge
and the earth is huge
and when we're on the ground we tend to
think
you know we're busy and we're
responsible and we have lots to do and
we tend to think that we're the center
of importance and you sort of have to
but
let me tell you when you get ready for a
space flight you realize that first of
all
thousands of people are helping you get
ready for the flight and assuring your
safety and doing the engineering and all
the checks and you're the beneficiary of
that then you get up above the earth you
look down on the beautiful earth
and you see evidence of
of mankind down on the earth both good
and bad and you look out in the heavens
you see the comet you see the moon you
see the stars
rising and setting over the earth's limb
you realize that you really are very
small and very very lucky
you