people stay
we are
one more song
please
oh
good morning discovery uh
as ecom pointed out that music is really
for the planning shift because we're
gonna have to stay and finish the
execute package
uh good morning mark uh and to the
planning shift
we were hoping maybe that bit for us
that we'd stay a little bit longer but
uh
too bad for you guys
i hate to break it to you kurt but we're
still talking nominal mission duration
but uh great to be with you again
well we'd just like to welcome everyone
to the mid deck of the space shuttle
discovery
uh we're on our 124th orbit around the
earth since our launch last thursday
we the mission has been going great
we've completed
eight days of intense payload operations
uh the kit folks at ksc has given us a
great vehicle in discovery she has
operated flawlessly for the last eight
days and just to let you know where we
are we're currently 160 nautical miles
above the earth surface of the earth and
we're in the south pacific
and during the press conference we'll be
pressed passing across south america and
northern europe
and jscpo we're ready for questions
this is marcia dunn of the associated
press uh for one or more of the rookies
i'm wondering what your biggest surprise
about space flight has been so far and
i'm thinking more of the day-to-day
stuff not necessarily the scientific
experiments
this is steve robinson i'm a rookie and
i think one of the biggest surprises has
certainly been the uh
uh how much fun and how how initially
awkward it could be floating around in
in in the free fall situation that we
have here and and also how efficient it
can be for storing things it's been uh
uh we're really going to miss that when
we get back on earth
and i'm robert i think the biggest
surprise for me was just
how the day-to-day activities change you
know getting getting up in the morning
and washing and getting ready for the
day is a lot different here in space
obviously there are things that you know
that we kind of take for granted when
we're in gravity like
spit out your toothpaste and it always
so that doesn't happen here so you do
that a little bit differently and and
the whole morning routine changes
tremendously that was the biggest
surprise for me
is that beyond a trick within uh i guess
what i will add to that is after about
five or six days up here you get kind of
uh used to the funny attitudes up here
where up can be anywhere and don't could
be anywhere and get used to working
upside down and whatever and it feels
kind of natural after five or six days
japanese investigators say this is the
last space test of the mfd and i'm
wondering do you think it's ready for
when it flies next time on the
international space station could you
sort of give a report card please
oh i'd give it an a plus it's
really been fun for steve and i to fly
the arm through all the different
scenarios that we have and it's
performed very well and there are some
things we really could not even test on
the ground some of the compliance
functions and we sort of feel like test
pilots up here trying out the arm and we
have
taken it to the edge of its envelope and
tested every possible mode and i think
we have a lot of good data and we still
are learning a lot about it and we'll be
ready for international space station
this is seth bornstein from the orlando
sentinel actually if jan can if you can
keep this just to follow up on that
question
uh there have been so you know you've
had little problems with the computer
commands and you've had sort of stop and
go with the arm has that at all been
frustrating or annoying
or is it something you just really don't
even
notice that much
well we certainly notice it when
something happens like that but
as i said this is sort of a test flight
of this hardware and it's performed very
well and in the compliance mode the
flexible compliance mode is something we
can't test
uh in one g
in the gravity of earth
and so that has really been where we've
had the surprises so we we really uh
didn't know what to expect there and the
fact that we we had to uh play with arm
a little bit more to get it to do what
we wanted to do really uh was not a
worry to us it's something that
was kind of interesting to see how the
different compliance modes worked
as far as the ground commanding
that went very well most of the day we
only missed one ride at the end
when we lost the computer lock so we
proved that the ground commanding works
and i think that was really
uh
a real triumph to command the arm from
the ground and uh that really proves
that we'll be ready for that for
international space station so the few
little glitches we've had i
and one for kurt brown there
uh there's a long streak now going this
year and into much of last year for
first day landings uh first attempt
first day attempt landings at ksc with
very few uh
diversions to california do you feel
under pressure that uh you're gonna have
to land
here at ksc on the first day and and why
do you think it is that uh
shuttles keep um aren't
being waived off for weather much and
landing on the first first try now
well probably the the pressure's not on
me it may be on mission control they do
all the real weather investigation prior
to giving us a go for the orbit burn but
we obviously trust their judgment quite
well and uh and we'll be ready to go
wherever they send us um i don't want to
say we're just lucky but uh obviously
every subtle landing that we do we
always look at the weather very
very strongly so that we understand what
it will do within the next hour so after
the burn so
you have to give a lot of credit to our
space meteorology group they do a great
job at looking at the weather
forecasting it and
i think they're they're just that good
if they give us a go for the orbit we
can we can come on in there
pete altery with the west kentucky news
uh for briarni um as a principal
investigator on the uh the mims
i was wondering if you could comment on
the uh the status and the effectiveness
of both the units that are now on orbit
and in particular
how the mir unit
is its results have impacted on what you
did on shuttle
you uh united mirror's been up there for about
a year and we've learned a fair bit from
that and i'm basically those results we
actually suggested the design of this
one a little bit to improve on that
and in the data that i've sent to the
ground from this unit uh the folks on
the ground report back up that we've got
about a four to five improvement in the
performance of this system
and that's largely because of the small
changes we've made in the design of this
system
this has been for me recently a while
we've been surprised by a couple of
things that we're dealing with and we
had one maintenance issue that we've uh
solved i think now and we're in
operation here again
but they use the performance quite well
i think they certainly improve the
vibration environment for experiments
of the type that we're going to do in
the next few years on space station
with all these uh icy comets coming into
the atmosphere i know i know they're not
ice by the time they reach your orbit
but uh they're water vapor is it going
to be possible to see if you guys are
flying through water vapor or can you
any test or or whatever to to determine
this
well that's a good question and uh this
is a brand new theory about uh icy
snowballs helping the earth from from
deep space and possibly a source of
water
on the earth's surface or at least
hydroxyl in the earth's atmosphere where
we are now 160 miles out we're well
above
the earth's atmosphere and so we don't
expect to find uh water or any
components of water up where we are
but uh we have deployed the crystal spa
satellite and the marcy instrument uh on
that satellite and both the crysta and
the marcy are taking detailed
explorations uh at the middle atmosphere
and making new discoveries uh since we
put it out about
eight days ago
and one of one of the
very
interesting bits of data that's come in
and this is very fresh data so it hasn't
really been analyzed to its fullest
extent is that there is a large amount
of hydroxyl which is a component
that's both involved in water being
atmos in the atmosphere and also
is
one of the major
players in the destruction of ozone in
the atmosphere so it's important to know
about hydroxyl and there's a lot of it
in the middle atmosphere between about
40 and 60 miles we need to learn more
about that and i think the crystal spas
and marcy instruments out there right
now are going to tell us a lot more
about
how much water is there and give us a
lot to think about where about where it
may have come from
and commander can you tell me what's the
proudest accomplishment of this fight as
you see it for you and your crew
well i'd probably have to say the
spectrum of the activities we have on
board and the number of activities we
have on board as i mentioned in the
opening we've completed eight days of
very intense payload operations and all
those have gone very smoothly we've had
a few things to slow us down we've
gotten behind in the timeline a little
bit but due to the extraordinary efforts
of the folks on the ground we're able to
blend those back in into next day's
activities so we uh we're right where we
should be so i i'd have to be very very
proud of my crew doing all that with
three rookies on board they have to
adapt the space flight first and then
work the uh
the payload operations and they've done
an excellent job of that and
with all the activities we have it's
going to be a one of the shuttle
missions that we can look back and be
very very proud of
and i guess one for uh kent rominger
since he's kind of lonely there
um
aren't you going to be doing much of the
uh
rendezvous activity tomorrow and can you
take us
through a few steps of what's going to
happen
yeah and the uh the rondo is actually a
team effort with all of us on board in
particular
obviously uh commander kurt brown myself
and then uh
robert kerbeam have done the primary
amount of training for the rendezvous
but the rendezvous will start actually
before we get in the rendezvous
checklist which is four hours about five
hours before the actual
grapple of the satellite even before
that
some of our burns will be begin phasing
us to close back in on crystal spas
and christus boss is approximately 35
miles
behind us right now we're out in front
of it and we do some phasing burns to
raise
our orbit to slow us down relative to
christa and let us close on it we
actually hop over the top of krista
and do a
full circle loop all the way back around
it and we stop and come up from below
for a while and then continue that first
full circle loop
back around to being out in front of
again where we started except this time
we're only 300 feet out in front of it
instead of 30 miles and then we close on
into that final grapple
you