and the way the sunlight plays upon her
head
i'm
hey
she's close to me
softly smile i know she must be
she goes with me
good
good morning discovery uh that one was
for you bjarni you probably guessed that
and uh
we know you're thinking a lot about
vibrations these days and uh may all
your good vibrations be very small
thanks mark just took a little while to
figure that out kind of slow up here but
hopefully we'll be back in business with
them good vibrations in a couple hours
sounds good
colonel brown good morning and thank you
for joining us this morning
good morning to you and it's uh
definitely a pleasure we always love to
talk to the folks
let me ask you first of all how long
have you folks been up this morning i
understand the beach boys the sound of
the beach boys at least awakened you a
little earlier this morning how long
have you been up and at work
well we just been up a couple three
hours now we're just finishing up on our
post leap activities which is basically
getting up and getting reconfigured for
the day's work
and matter of fact we're just starting
uh some of our robot robot arm
operations in just a few moments
what will you be doing with that
well actually today is a new sequence of
uh testing uh we're gonna detach the
orbital replacement unit one more time
today
but the new part is uh the ground is
going to uplink commands to the robot
arm
and they're going to control it from the
ground pretty much and we're going to be
on the ass flight deck of the orbiter
watching the uh arm and uh we're kind of
like these safety observers and the
ground will be doing all the commanding
let me ask you i understand that
the german satellite that you launched
the other day
came within one and a half miles of a
500 piece of
space junk up there in orbit how close
was that and how serious a problem was
that
well actually um there's obviously a lot
of debris up here in space we've been
coming into space uh our country and
other countries for many years so there
is a lot of debris up here
we do track that debris and we try to
maintain our distance from that
i read the news this morning obviously
and saw that
it wasn't any danger to the orbiter
obviously they had a little bit of
concern for the satellite but once they
uh got the tracking down and narrowed it
down exactly where it was going it uh it
was okay that as far as i know they did
not have to maneuver the crystal
satellite around to uh
to miss the uh the piece of hardware but
they could have done that if they really
needed to
but i read down here that had they in
fact collided it would have been
disastrous for that satellite is that
correct
well satellites were built to operate in
vacuum and in space they're not very
structurally sound meaning that anything
that collides with orbiting body is
probably going to do severe damage
just because of the speeds that are
traveling and if they're coming from
different directions you almost double
that speed
okay let me the this satellite that is
out there is i understand is doing
research on the ozone layers of the
earth uh tell me a little bit about that
and why that is significant for for
those of us down here
well we're trying to learn as much as we
can about the earth's atmosphere and how
we as humans affect that atmosphere
this satellite flew back in 1994 on the
sts-66 shuttle mission i had a chance to
take part in that mission also and we
gathered a lot of data about the ozone
the upper level structure of the
atmosphere
and this mission we're going to do the
same but they've incorporated a new
twist to their satellite
they're able to maneuver their satellite
and yaw it left and right to be able to
cover more of the earth's surface so
we'll be able to map more of the ozone
and the upper level chemicals and
structures of the atmosphere than we did
in 1994. now when you put all that data
together we're trying to understand how
the earth's atmosphere evolves over time
and how we as humans affect that
atmosphere obviously we need that
atmosphere to survive and and if we are
doing something that we think may be
hurting it we need to figure out a
better way of doing it
and the other thing you learn from space
up in the shuttle if you look out at the
earth's limb the little layer of
atmosphere around the shuttle or excuse
me around the earth
from the shuttle
you uh you realize how fragile the earth
really is the atmosphere because it's a
very thin
body of material that envelops the earth
and protects us from all the harmful
emissions from outer space
what's on tap for today specifically
what what things do you have planned
well a lot of the day will be done with
the
the mfd the
little small robot arm that we have on
board we'll be working on that we also
have the mid deck experiments going on
the
bds which is working with cell growth
uh right to my uh my left here you can't
see just out of the photo uh bjarney
trigevison our canadian payload
specialist is working hard on his uh
microgravity isolation mount experiment
and uh
we're just busy as bees up here i this
was my fourth flight and um
i'm
still awed by how busy we've been on
this flight and uh and it seems to
continue from day to day so we're very
happy to be at work and
time up here is very valuable so we like
to stay busy
and discovery houston we do have video
from the mid deck
okay bill welcome aboard
we'll give you a couple minutes of
flight deck
while we're standing up here
good copy
you