STS-40: Postflight Press Conference

good afternoon and welcome to the STS 40 postflight crew press conference I would like to introduce once again our commander of the flight uh Brian D O Conor and turn it over to him Brian thanks Barbara uh this is really great uh we finally got our whole crew back to be able to talk to the American public uh this is a interesting flight in that only three of us got to come back here to Houston right after the flight uh the four payload crew members had to stay at Dryden for a lot of medical tests and experimentation on their bodies uh for another week and so they just got back a few days ago uh we've been doing some debriefings and now we get to sit together and talk to you about what we did on this great Mission uh I'm going to introduce the crew here to my immediate right is Sid Gutierrez the pilot and Tammy Jernigan who was uh MS2 Mission specialist number two she was the uh flight engineer for asent entry we are the Orbiter crew members and then we have the four payload crew members Jim beun and Ray sedon who are the NASA members of the payload crew and then we have drew Gaffney and Millie Hughes fulford who are the payload specialist members of the payload crew without further Ado we'd like to show you what we did on this Mission with a movie and uh as we go through the movie we'll talk through it this is the crew patch it shows sls1 space lab Life Sciences 1 as the logo and this is what it looked like on the 5th of June that morning before we uh suit it up this is the crew in the suit room we'd been through this once before about 4 days prior where we had gone out to the Launchpad and had an abort uh due to an IMU problem so by now we were getting kind of used to this routine and as you see the various crew members uh loading their pockets with the Emergency Equipment putting the suits on uh it may not show here but we were really ready to go after several scrubs it was time to fly on launch day Colombia performed flawlessly initially you may recall the weather was no go due to some low clouds thunderstorms and fog in the area but after about an hour and a half of hold a blue Speck formed to the West it moved over the pad uh grew in size and eventually we were cleared to launch the SSM throttle to 100% but when the srbs lit that's when we really knew we were going into orbit we rolled to a 39° inclination to set us up for our flight in first stage we really knew we were flying a rocket it was a solid e ticket despite the hole in the sky we did penetrate a cloud layer at about 14 to 16,000 ft it was well within launch commit Criterion it creates some beautiful imagery you'll see a shadow formed by the sun falling on the rocket plume you can see the shadow going off to the left there we opened the P bay doors about 2 hours after launch to reveal just a spectacular view of the earth um we also have a clear view of the space lab in the payload Bay uh the space lab was affectionately deemed slave quarters about halfway through the mission after we had configured the Orbiter for space activities we got to work activating the space lab we spent about 2 hours setting up checking out uh the environmental control system the computers and the communication systems you'll see Sid as he heads back across the tunnel that we had to open to get back into space lab uh after we uh performed the activation we got to work on setting up all of the uh experiment Hardware itself here you get to see the first view of the first uh working laboratory in space dedicated to the life sciences you'll see the experiment Hardware in racks along the sidewalls we have overhead stowage containers and several pieces of equipment down the center aisle this is Jim uh performing an exercise test you can see breathing on a bag that system with a gas analyzer allowed us to measure how much the body consumed in terms of oxygen how much carbon dioxide It produced and how exercise was affected during Zerg and then compare that with pre- and postflight this was done in conjunction with the State University of New York at Buffalo and UT Southwestern in Dallas this was the first time that we've actually measured maximal Exercise capacity this is uh you see uh Rey and me uh doing an echo cardiogram this is an ultrasound test that allows us to image the heart and with that we can see how much the how much fluid shift is has occurred how the heart has expanded and how well it's functioning in Zerg one of the other core experiments we had was the pulmonary function test experiment and that was uh sponsored by the University of California San Diego and what we're measuring here is differences in the way the lungs function in weightlessness and how gases exchanged in weightlessness versus on 1G here on Earth the uh all the crew participated in that experiment here's Drew doing the barrel reflex experiment what this does is it put various pre various amounts of pressure on your neck at the pressure receptors that govern help govern your blood pressure and by understanding how we change our ability to regulate blood pressure in orbit versus here it gives us a better handle on the kind of problems we see during entry with uh blood pressure regulation uh this experiment was designed to look at changes in blood flow and the compliance uh of blood vessels in the lower extremity in Zerg it's also from the University of Texas in Dallas blood pressure cuff is pumped up up on the thigh and then we measure changes in size of the calf um here I am spinning Jim in the rotating chair uh we're testing his vestibular response in zero gravity this uh was sponsored by MIT um it's much like going in a merry go around when you stop suddenly and throw your head down we're testing to see how quickly we get rid of that opposite reversal spin that we feel in uh this experiment we uh instead of our rotating we put heading to a dome that's rotating and then we measure the response by looking at how the eye responds to the feeling of vection and we compare this to our responses on the ground the Orbiter crew members volunteered to participate in a number of space lab experiments we renamed them for Simplicity this particular experiment is officially called bmmd or body mass measuring device we called it Wayne yourself uh several other experiments the one you recall with the collar we renamed that one suck on your neck it was officially the barrel reflex and the pulmonary function test we called blowing the pipe one of the advantages to working in space is the short drive time between uh your work and your home here you see it's about 15 to 20 seconds to get from the space lab back to the Orbiter this is Jim and Tammy transiting the uh tunnel in addition to the primary experiments we conducted many secondary experiments including 12 getaway special or gas cans they were activated from the flight deck but they were actually located back behind the space lab they included investigations of Material Science plant biology and Cosmic radiation one of the other things that we and the Orbiter crew spent a lot of time doing during the mission was measuring the uh air quality this is one of several experiments that uh gathered in air samples and looked for things like microbes and uh particles we also checked the uh the sound levels in the vehicle this is Sid looks like he's looking for water but he's not what he's doing is measuring the sound levels and we did this on the flight deck the mid deck and also back in the space lab on day seven we conducted the orbital acceleration research experiment we flew a number of Maneuvers including a loop Aon roll and a 360° flat turn I'll challenge some of the pilots on Earth to match that last maneuver we were studying the performance of a miniature electrostatic accelerometer device we also installed an improved uh filter to uh help the performance of the humidity separator it was located under the mid deck or down in the pit as we called it and this yielded some surprising information about fluid flow in a zerg environment Brian and Sid are here preparing to do some Earth observations we photograph the land the water and the clouds not just for aesthetic reasons but for the wealth of scientific data the photographs contain here we're passing through the straight of Gibralter um we're going obviously west to east and on the left hand side you see Spain and the right hand side uh is Morocco the Mediterranean Sea is in the in the distance here we have a very nice view of southern Italy including the island of Sicily next will be approaching Kuwait um and soon you'll have an unmistakable view of the oil fires that still persist in the quati oil field since the war since I live in San Francisco the California coastline was one of my favorite views out the window and UC see Berkeley was also another favorite view for all of us since many of us went to UC Berkeley down the peninsula we can see NASA Ames Research Center that had a lot of the U research animals on board and coming up in the distance uh you can see just about center of the screen to the right is the dry lake beds and the Edwards complex there which we were going to land that about 4 days from the time we took this photo here's the East Coast coming up and we're there's the Appalachian just going by the edge of the payo bay you can see the Chesapeake Bay near the center right at the bottom and Del Marva Peninsula above that you can see New Jersey Delaware Bay and up to the Philadelphia area Manhattan Island Long Island and all the way up in fact to Cape codon that was a pretty nice site one of the hardware test objectives that we flew on this flight for the ases research center was to see if particulates and liquids could be contained within this general purpose workstation uh here you see me squirted being strawberry uh punch out of a drink container and you can see that the fluid tended to stick want to stick on the walls the particulates that we release from this uh balloon uh were entrained a little bit in the air flow which goes from the top of the cabinet down to the bottom we we showed that we can handle the cages and keep the rats healthy but we also wanted to be sure that that the animals could be handled and and uh taken care of and worked with as they are on earth and it turns out it's exactly the same the the rats are very comfortable being held like this this is what you do in a laboratory on earth works the same in space both rats and human beings lose both bone and muscle during space flight and during our flight we took many samples of blood in order to test the changes in the hormones in in our blood systems during flight and we believe that that perhaps is part of the reason we're losing the bone and the U muscle during flight and that was a nice exchange of tubes um it took uh at least two uh to three of us to do the blood draws because it was complicated this experiment uses lymphocytes or white blood cells to investigate changes in our immune system that occur when we leave the 1G environment of Earth for the zero g environment of space here we're injecting the cultures with a mitogen that promotes cell division and by comparing our 1G control cultures in our centrifuge with our zerog cultures we can determine if lymy proliferation is decreased when you go to orbit and thereby May adversely our immune system um as many of you know we had some trouble with the refrigerator and freezers during our flight and and here's a picture of um Jim and Sid cleaning the filters in order to help the refrigerators and the freezers work more efficiently uh this is where we put our blood samples so it was a very important event to keep them running here we're preparing to take some camp quarter Fage of our jellyfish crew members um jellyfish contain gravity receptors that are analogous to the oolith organs in the inner ear and by taking a look at the behavior of the jellyfish whose gravity sensing organs have developed in zerog G we can compare that swimming behavior um to their 1G counterparts um one thing that you'll notice here is that the jellyfish tend to swim in circles in arcs whereas on the ground they simply swim to the top of the flask and float down this is a test of the medical restraint system um for possible use on Space Station my Brave patient Sid here is allowing his astrophysicist to test his reflexes I told Sid if he didn't move his knee I just have to hit him harder the next time so he became more cooperative and this is simply a demonstration of Performing CPR in zerog it is quite feasible um this is ressa Annie that I'm performing the CPR procedure on and she is uh strapped to the mid deck lockers the breaking of bread in space took on added meaning on this flight since we were keeping track of all of our liquid and fluid intake uh for the metabolic studies that uh uh we were doing we've kept track of everything that we've taken in from a few weeks before flight up until the present time uh we're looking at changes in nutrient metabolism and in probably in food preferences too here we are uh at a typical dinner beginning to chase our food around and of of course it was always a challenge even to try and stay clean on a 9-day flight without a good shower here Drew is uh shampooing his hair with a waterless shampoo that uh we had on board and it worked pretty well at least for people with short hair or no hair yeah I'll bounce for that they uh they had warned us you know that we know that various orbiters have slightly different sounds to them and uh about Midway in the mission uh we noticed a sound emanating it seemed like from we weren't sure where in the mid deck and trying to discover what it was and Brian and Tammy were looking around they seem to finally locate it down in the Lio storage area there but it turned out that for some reason Sid was down there well once we had solved that problem about what was causing the noise um we really weren't too worried about it so time we just button it back up went back to work uh about the sixth day everybody was uh ready for a little bit Recreation we uh knocked the bike back down in the stove position and everybody kind of went back for a little bit of gym time back in the space lab and here you'll see what we think is probably the the world's record and probably for the solar system too the number of people on someone's back doing a push-up uh Sid's on the bottom uh and Drew is on the top and you can see Sid really pumping these push-ups out but we think it was probably tougher on the people near top like Drew and myself as we were slamming into the lockers on overhead and uh we did not stop because of s lack of stamina but rather Drews pain threshold on my own probably the day before landing we fired up one of the auxiliary power units and ran through a checkout of the Orbiter flight control system and the RCs Jets since brushing your teeth in Zer G is difficult at best we made a liberal use of chewing gum to facilitate working in close quarters we closed the port pbay door about 3 hours and 20 minutes prior to the deorbit burn um soon you'll see evidence of possible interference of the environmental seal with the door closure and also you can see the loose thermal blankets that Jim's going to talk more about later then came entry day and or entry time we all got dressed in our orange suits this is Jim who was rotating back and forth between mid deck and Flight Deck helping uh people get in their suits and so on and here you see our uh two stalwart payload specialists in their suits ready for entry on the mid deck this is a shot taken out the top of the window and you can see that uh fantasm that other people have reported where the ions are recombining behind the vehicle as you come down through the atmosphere and you can see the reflection off of Sids back there we came down through entrance did several aerodynamic uh test inputs the winds were nice and we were scheduled to land on Runway 22 the concrete Runway at Edwards one of the things that we had to do on this Landing was to land a little faster than normal because we are a heavyweight vehicle and also we did a high-speed nose wheel steering test uh to open up the envelope for the nose wheel steering system on the shuttle as the nose comes down you you can see the big speed brakes out there on the top of the shuttle to help slow it down one of the things you probably saw on this flight different from all the other shuttle flights is that we didn't walk down the stairs out of the vehicle this uh crew transport vehicle which is an airport transfer bus was outfitted um so that we can get the crews out very quickly get them changed and start doing medical tests and look at the condition of the of the crew immediately on landing and instead of the 45 to 90 minutes that it usually takes this is really going to help us in the future to get the crews out quickly and get the medical studies that we need for planning our longer duration flights plank was not [Laughter] used well we're hearing from the scientists that we had a very successful Mission scientifically this is our crew and we pose for our picture uh months before the launch the smiles reflect how we feel today about this flight and all the people that helped support it and make it go