STS-31: Postflight Press Conference

good morning and welcome to the STS 31 postflight crew press conference our crew of five has about 20 minutes of film and 26 or seven slides with which to share their unique and rare perspective of this Mission and with that I'll turn it right over to crew Commander Lauren Shriver thank you Jeff uh first of all let me welcome everybody here this morning in the room and uh around the country who's listening in uh if it hasn't been apparent so far in all of our discussions uh we really enjoyed flying this Mission and uh we believe that we had a very successful Mission overall we did exactly what the mission set out to do and uh it it was just unbelievable end to end and what we tried to do throughout was uh document as best we could what was actually taking place at the at the time we were doing it uh and that's uh what we want to do this morning then is update everybody uh by means of a film that we put together and also show you some slides after that before we get into that though uh in case nobody uh anybody does not know the rest of the crew members on uh my right is Charlie Bolan the pilot and uh just did just a little bit of everything on board the shuttle while we were up there and uh uh we'll we'll have words from him as the movie goes on uh Bruce mcis ms1 he was uh our HST expert on on all of its systems and also of course ev1 uh and almost the guy to open the hatch and go outside and uh almost crank open the uh second solar array uh Dr Steve Holly next to him he was our RMS operator MS2 two going uphill and uh during entry and uh did an excellent job of course of maneuvering the HST on the end of the magic wand so to speak and then Kathy Sullivan uh ms3 for the flight again also ev2 and uh just about uh had her hand on the airlock depress valve to go that extra 5 PSI to get down to vacuum for uh that almost Eva that we did uh with that and uh in order not to take up too much time so that uh we have time for your questions at the end let's go ahead and uh get started with the film uh we'll we'll be narrating as we go and uh one thing I would like you to uh try to pay attention to as the film unravels is the uh rather continuous pictures of the Earth in the background and this is some of the beautiful scenery that we were seeing always in the background whenever you look outside and it's daylight uh some of the very beautiful pictures of the earth as the rest of the events unfold so why don't we go ahead and uh roll that film let this of course our mission patch and uh we like it a lot we think it told a story all of its own very appropriate for the uh flight this is the morning of launch uh going through all of our suitup drill and uh each one of us then goes through a pressure check a suit Integrity check and you see that in progress here for uh all five of us sort of in turn the suiting up has added a little time to the morning's event so we split the crew two and then three to so that we can all arrive at a common state of Readiness and walk out together as you see here the trip to the launch pads relatively quick um it was dark as you could all see uh you get out there and I think uh you've heard it said by other crew members that you get out there and there's a little bit different on launch morning because the vehicle seems to be alive this is actually the main engine start which occurs roughly six to 7 seconds before the liftoff uh and then the solid rocket boosters ignite on board this time I think I was a little bit more sensitized to everything uh I actually felt the main engine ignition inside and you could feel the twang of the vehicle and everybody feels the solid rocket boosters ignite because you get lots more noise and vibration and with the suits which none of us had worn before you actually end up bouncing around inside this little environment of your own um our Ascent was pretty much a a normal what we call Direct insertion where uh we actually did not do a an OMS or an orbital maneuvering system one burn we just allowed ourselves to glide on up uh to basically a 331 by 27 or 47 nautical mile orbit before we did our insertion burn uh the main engine cut off the velocity was a little bit faster than we normally see roughly 26,000 ft per second and uh the most impressive thing to me was the way we could not see the Earth after Mo as you all know our altitude was unique for the shuttle program we went to 330 Mi circular orbit it was it was truly noticeable and impressive from on board and we hope that we were able to share some of that with you on the down link television first thing every crew does is get the Orbiter conf figured for being on orbit and of I think particular concern to our crew was the number of activities that we had to accomplish on flight day one including checking out the RMS which you see us doing here we do that early in the flight of course because if there were failures with the arm we would have overnight and the next morning to try to figure out what the impact would be on the Hubble Space Telescope deploy operations in our case the arm worked beautifully and there were no problems at all with arms check out and and we got that done on time on flight day one and uh the other major activity that was going on at that time was uh doing all the Preparatory work for the potential spacewalk the next day okay what you're seeing here is uh the power ratchet tool which is a device uh produced by the Gard space flight center uh adapted specifically to uh work on the Space Telescope both the maintenance and repair missions and uh for deploying the solar rays which if done manually required 120 full turns and in suited tests underwater it proven to be fairly fatiguing uh this unit has its own internal battery uh a high performance electric motor and little microprocessor controller to control the speed the torque uh and the number of turns per trigger setting or per trigger squeeze here you see some additional configuration of tools uh going into the airlock and preparation uh for the Eva that almost was in addition to configuring the airlock with about a dozen tools most of which were unique to the HST possible deploy Mission tasks uh we had to conduct a pre-breathe reduce the cabin pressure and check out all three of the space suits we had we had an upper torso assembly which includes all the life support systems and computer monitoring systems on the suit as a spare unit in the event that either of the primary suits for Bruce or ey had developed a problem uh all in all it took uh Bruce and I the lion share of our time on flight day one and a goodly measure of Charlie's Time Charlie was always the critical resource being split between the RMS operations and the Eva early in the morning on flight day two which was actually less than 24 hours after launch we were given a go for HST deploy operations and that meant that I was uh uh go to unrd the RMS and move it over and grapple the space telescope in the bay which you see here we're trying to convey a sense I think of how big the Space Telescope is and uh the fact that the aperture door is bright and shiny and it's it's right in front of the windows and uh all of that as I had described in the pre-flight press conference was of some concern to me being able to see to do the task uh it was about as difficult as as we had expected and and the views as you can see here out the window certainly degrade rapidly as the telescope begins to come out of the bay uh Charlie was very helpful at uh talking me through the deploy operations with the arm particularly as I mentioned down low in the bay where the clearances are fairly small and you're trying to go go slowly if you look carefully through the window I think you'll be able to see the rate at which we were trying to move the the HST up out of the bay uh slow is is good when you have two very large Vehicles very close together and uh as you know it took a little bit longer on orbit to do that task than uh we had simulated on the ground and I think that that that's probably to be expected uh given the uh the fact that U we weren't really the pacing item in the deploy sequence anyway and uh we wanted to make sure that the the job was done properly there are a number of coordinated activities that actually need to take place it isn't just Charlie and and me operating the arm but Lauren has to position the the vehicle the Orbiter vehicle in the proper attitude so that the Sun Shines on the proper part of the Space Telescope and and he had to make a couple of different Maneuvers in addition to manually holding the the Orbiter attitude uh near where it wanted to be while the the arm and the telescope were in motion we had a number of constraints governing how the the Orbiter could move uh when the telescope was unbirth and when it was in motion and and he had to manage all of that very carefully we did find that this manual control of the uh Orbiter using uh certain dap settings or digital autopilot work very well and have recommended that uh that be uh highly considered as a mode of uh Orbiter control in large payloads like this after Steve lifted the telescope clear of the bay he went through a a number of Maneuvers the end result of which was getting the the bottom or the base end of the telescope pointing forward uh and after Lauren oriented the Orbiter these this was pointed toward the Sun the solar array booms were folded out 90° and as you see here the solar array panels were unrolled you have to watch very closely because this is a rather slow process taking on the order of six minutes to fully unreal these uh sets of solar array panels uh there are five separate solar panel assemblies on each side of the the Center drum uh two arrays on the entire telescope the uh set that you see here the plus V2 solar array deployed very nicely uh as I'm sure you're aware later on uh there were some difficulties deploying the minus V2 array which led Kathy and myself to finish the suiting up process uh and ultimately to get into the airlock uh depressurize the air loock to 5 lbs per square inch or approximately half the cabin pressure and to stand by just inches away from the hatch and from the depress valve for about 2 hours until uh telescope separation and release from the Orbiter was complete and until Steve had completed birthing the RMS here you see the plus V2 array fully deployed these arrays are a contribution from the European Space Agency along with the faint object camera and represent 15 to 20% of their participation in the program when the Solar Ray that had been giving us trouble was finally unfurled properly we actually didn't have very much time until the release opportunity as I recall it was around 30 minutes or so so there were a number of activities that that Lauren and I had to do uh with Charlie's help and Charlie was kind of going back and forth between the flight deck and the mid deck throughout the day uh we noticed that uh one of the surprises was the amount of clearance between the arm and the uh solar array at separation it was a little bit less than we had been led to expect from the simulation that we had performed on the ground however the control of the arm was very precise and the control of the Orbiter at separation was very precise and uh we had no concerns about about contacting the arm with the Solar Ray uh but it was something that Lauren and I kept a a very close eye on what you're seeing in this scene is actually the Space Telescope after release as we are flying over the western coast of Peru uh actually crossing the Andes mountains and that that to me was pretty Spectacular from a visual sense some of the information that we learned on this flight that we hope to pass on to whichever crew is selected to do maintenance and repair missions on the HST it's the fact that the HST is highly visible I guess you would expect that just because of of the way it's it's configured with reflecting U thermal blankets and the big solar rays uh also providing a lot of reflecting surface area we could see it for a long time of course Post Release in addition we found throughout the flight every Terminator we would be able to see the HST reflecting sunlight even at a distance of of greater than 40 miles uh that was a little bit of a surprise uh of course as Bruce and Kathy can describe this is uh not the end of anything but the beginning of the lifetime of the telescope and and a lot of the work that they did on this flight will will come back to produce results years from now as the maintenance uh missions are are launched to service the telescope and keep it an operational Observatory for years to come as Steve has mentioned it is designed for a a 15 to 20 year life time as an observatory facility with uh planned visits roughly every 5 years to replace those components which are known to degrade such as the batteries and the solar arrays uh to replace anything that fails and also to provide the opportunity for exchanging scientific instruments as the data which comes back from the current set of five instruments uh is analyzed and perhaps reveals new Pathways to explore uh I talked with the folks in the uh Space Telescope operation control center this morning uh they have rearranged some elements of the checkout bringing the scientific instrument checked out forward and working on some minor problems in the pointing and control system but all in all they feel like they're about on schedule in terms of the amount of checkout uh that's required uh here you see me looking at the uh protein crystal growth experiment uh this is a secondary payload from the University of Alabama in Birmingham and in this close-up shot uh chamber C3 you can see some crystals of carboxy Ester hydrolase which was one of the the compounds the idea here is to create large defect free crystals in zero gravity that can be used under x-ray analysis to reveal the exact structure of the protein and once the structure has been revealed uh you can tailor antibodies or vaccines or other biological agents and then produce those uh to yield the desired effect unlike zerog G electroforesis where we were attempting to manufacture commercial quantities of substances this is just designed to discover the structure and do the rest work on on the ground this is one of the other secondary experiments we had it was uh conceived of by a student at a high school at the time in Utah and sponsored by a corporation out there what you see are three different views uh the center one is the the actual electrical Arc being struck and the two others are mirror views and the idea was to look at what effects uh driving an arc and affecting it with outside magnetic fields would have in zero g we carried two IMAX cameras one was the in Cabin camera that you see uh Kathy and me trying to get reloaded here uh the other was the IMAX cargo bay camera which we have not seen any of the film yet but hopefully we'll see in another week or two one of of Kathy's dad's fishing camp yeah that's about right I was obligated to make sure I got a few good shots of some key places in Baja California for my father but uh we also tried to put some of the spectacular Earth views that we had on film to give you a sense of both the scale of the view and the rate of passage which is a little slower of course course at this altitude than than lower flights uh in some of the Stills which we'll get to later you may get a better appreciation of this here you're over uh Central Mexico the two bright dots at the upper Center portion of the frame are the two large volcanoes just southeast of Mexico City and if you strain a little bit just up and to the left of those volcanoes you may see a slightly lighter grayer patch of ground and that is in fact the urban area of Mexico City itself uh it was easy to have all of Mexico literally from the California Mexico border to the Gulf Coast and on up to Houston in your field of view at one time from our altitude which was very spectacular in fact as uh mentioned perhaps during the flight uh on one pass roughly in this location going toward the East we were puzzled to see a lake where we didn't recognize any Lake should be and on thinking about it Lauren realized that it was Lake Michigan that we were seeing and in fact we later Saw Lake in Lake Ontario being able to see entirely across the north south width of the United States from Over the Gulf of Mexico and here you're seeing across almost all of South America from just slightly east of the crest of the Andes out to the coast by Rio de Janeiro this was one of the least popular experiments aboard I wondered whether anyone would still speak to me after this if I hadn't already been hit this is something like8 TB tests at once there's a a certain toxin on each one of those sets of tines and the idea is to determine whether the body's response to immune system response varies at all in Zerg uh some of the body's immune response of course is governed by the the blood system and another level of it is controlled uh by the cellular structure of the body and the objective of this experiment specifically was to look at cell mediated immune response and see if one Mission specialist could survive administering it to two other people on the day before we go through a series of tests that we call flight control system or FCS checkout uh what Lauren Steve and I were doing here was actually going through various tests of uh the hydraulic system with the auxiliary power unit running actually firing the RCs Jets to make sure that they all operated properly and uh make sure that all the the systems on board were going to be good or go for the entry day our FCS checkout went very very smoothly with uh only uh very ins ific anomalies which we had seen before on previous flights this is uh we were trying to get you some lightning and you can see it over in the left to the left of the Earth's limb there that's one of the more spectacular scenes of nighttime is the lightning all over the Earth um just unbelievable when you when you get a chance to see it this is uh later an entry then this is about Mach 6 taken from a tracking camera out at Vandenburg uh we had been doing several aop PT on the way in all the way through entry to gather aerodynamic data to try to expand the flight envelope of the shuttle slightly this is a uh a scene here of uh we're rolling on the hack and coming around the heading alignment Circle uh you can see the sun on the very bottom of the wing there that that sun angle presented somewhat of a problem to Charlie and I uh as we flew right into it trying to turn on to the alignment surface ir and it wasn't until we got more than halfway around the circle that we finally had the Sun out of our eyes hard to read the inside and in transition to outside I was fortunate that Lauren is a real gracious soul and uh the pilot is kind of a misnomer you're a co-pilot but Lauren gave me an opportunity to fly the vehicle a little bit as we went subsonic and I thought it performed amazingly well we've just come through the inner Glide slope there and uh once you start to pull the nose up of course you're losing all the the uh precious air speed that you had preserved at that point Charlie lowered a gear about 300 ft above the ground and we just uh came on in establish an attitude and kind of hold it for the landing we had uh been sort of on again off again for uh Landing that day for the wind situation out at Edwards as you probably recall and uh we uh seemed to run out of air speed a little bit quicker than normal that I'm used to in the STA but but uh the shuttle uh does have a lot of Reserve capability there so overall The Landing went very smoothly and the nose wheel derotation rate uh continued to be very slow for the entire derotation we also flew uh the new carbon brakes for the shuttle program for the first time uh those brakes turned out to work very well they very smooth and very positive I think uh there'll be a great Ascent to the program as we can continue to uh fly those on other vehicles now and then look toward uh returning to KSC for landing and of course I planned that stop exactly in front of the Tower with this camera in mind so we could get a new slant on things and uh we did uh oh 30 or 40 minutes worth of uh post Landing uh cleanup switches and uh reconfiguring and then we're ready to get out of the inside fairly cool outside that day it was about 44 45° wind chill factor so we stayed inside the suits uh we had sent along the regular Blue flight suits that we thought we were going to get into but as Lauren mentioned the windchill factor made it desirous to just the combination of your heat inside the suit and the coolness of the Desert Air out there made it perfect