STS-63 Post-flight Presentation

I'd like to introduce the crew on my left Lieutenant Colonel Eileen kid Collins United States Air Force uh and she was a real pleasure to work with over the past year and a half I hope to work with her again in the near future uh and it was great flying with her uh it was her expertise that uh enabled us to hit the timing task to the exact second she was giving the guidance commands she was the Poli policewoman during the Rous making sure that we were doing everything according to schedule uh and she performed all of the burns on the on the Spartan uh retrieval uh she went to Syracuse University 1978 graduated with the math and economics major has a master's degree from uh Stanford and Webster uh she flew c-141s in the Air Force and was a professor of math at the Air Force Academy the kid was not a rookie when the srbs ignited she was right there with us as a as a veteran she's the perfect choice for American's first woman pilot in space on her left Dr Bernard Harris uh pulled together all of the science for me on this flight he was my payload commander and it was his expertise that enabled us to uh reprioritize and and repl and get all the extra experiments from Space 4 combined into space AB 3 uh he went to the University of Houston 1978 graduated a biology degree has a doctorate in medicine from Texas Tech did his residency work at the Mayo Clinic uh worked at NASA Ames he's uh on four faculty appointments he flew on STS 55 on Columbia he has great bedside manner but I'm not going to let him take any more blood from me uh Dr C Michel fall Esquire from Cambridge England before the flight I said he would had the unofficial title world's smartest man I saw a lot of the world and uh I'd like to upgrade that to the official title he is the world's smartest man at least of the world that I could see he's a computer Peter whiz from the University of Cambridge has a PHD in astrophysics I worked at NASA's mission control center before joining the astronaut office uh he flew on STS 45 and STS 56 Johan Kepler never guided 100 ton Vehicles together in space and he has Dr Janice Voss ms3 from Rockford Illinois uh did a superb job on the arm during the the grapple of Spartan uh she went to Purdue University has a PHD in uh MIT from MIT in astronomics Co-op here at JSC also uh and she flew on STS 57 she's a Commander's dream she just went up there and did every job that she was given did it expertly uh and and was a pleasure to fly with and I hope to fly with her again I hope to fly with all of them again my very good friend Colonel Vladimir gich Tito from Russia lar he's very cool if you've seen the uh his second launch attempt you'll know what I'm talking about you should have seen him on the arm during this flight I said pre-flight that we were going to watch him we did and we did learn a lot about space flight from Vladimir uh he was very cool on the arm he waved the folks around on the on the end of the arm and did an outstanding job we would like to roll the movie uh and after the movie we'll show our slides of course the toughest part about training is designing the patch and once you do that then you're ready to go fly here we are on suit up morning uh putting on the Asus suit four of us had the new suit it's a a very good design worked very well if we ever need it uh for depressurization system uh I'm sure it's going to work uh very well we also had the liquid cooling garment which kept us very cool on ascent and and during the entry that's also a new Improvement many people helped us over the year getting ready to go launch into space and it was great when we walked out uh to see some of the smiling faces of the folks that have helped us over the uh previous year and a half and it was nice to to wave at them and and give them a smile as we departed for the Launchpad of course as you approach it's the first time you've seen the the Launchpad when when there aren't very many people around this is a moment that takes me back to when I was about 6 years old and uh I first decided I wanted to be an astronaut this is looking up at your rocket and uh this sends shivers down my spine every time I think about it and it was a special feeling as we went up the elevator the main engines ignite 6 seconds prior to liftoff and then of course the srbs ignite when you see the launch from a distance uh in person or on cameras it looks like the vehicle is climbing very slowly and stately uh we are here to assure you that there's nothing slow about it it's uh Power and speed are the two words that come to mind when the srbs ignite it's a pretty rough ride a lot of vibration shaking going on um of course 7 million pounds of thrust uh and you can feel every one of those pounds the first rendevu maneuver is done right here on the launch pad we wait until the launch pad is in plane with the mirror and then we quickly launched that occurred shortly after midnight and so it was a night launch pretty exciting going uphill uh I especially like the uh The View uh that we see after we land it was great seeing the view in the cockpit but of course we're working the systems and making sure everything is working s orb separate and run our way once we get on orbit um we have a nice exterior look of the space have which is the module has all the experiments in fact 23 different experiments here you see myself and Below has a camera uh as we open the hatch to space hand uh the investigations included a variety of things from crystal growth to plant growth uh we even uh did uh uh the famous taste test that you heard about the experiments on board pretty much ran the entire complement of the kinds of experiments we do in space this is a protein crystal growth experiment that us a vapor diffusion apparatus these trays are full of little vials of protein crystals dissolved in a solution you pull the trades out you can see the little Chambers little around circles in the center of the screen each one has a little droplet that contains the solution and during the flight these drop puts the half moon shapes you see evaporate leaving the protein Crystal behind and hopefully they get very large crystals from this experiment we also had some other life sciences experiments on board back in the module this is Vladimir tto working on the astroculture experiment growing plants in a the sort of equipment that hopefully we can use on Space Station in the future future to grow things for astronauts to eat this is a robot we had on board called Charlotte you can see at the bottom right corner of the screen a cable there are eight cables like that attached to the corners of Charlotte which allows it to fly around like Charlotte in Charlotte Web it can turn switches as you see it during doing here it can punch buttons it has a camera this view is from the camera on board Charlotte so it can send pictures to the ground of how the experiments are performing in space so it can be used to work experiments when a crew is not available what you're about to see here is the odorx deploy uh three spheres and three dipoles were launched there goes one another sphere and a dipole the the purpose of this was to uh calibrate the ground radar so in the future they can better track orbital debris youall know about our jet problem uh we worked this pretty hard the first couple days of the flight we thought we were going to go into 33 ft um here you okay there's the oxidizer spewing out and you can see this very well at the Terminator passes but we thought we were going to go into 33 ft but with the leaking jet we knew that there'd be possibility we'd be limited to 400 ft or maybe even a th000 ft uh first first time we saw a station approximately 50 uh miles from us uh and we receive in this time we receive message from station Mir about uh we have decision about 30 ft approach this is the first time when we've been able to show you how dramatic the speed looks on orbit we're traveling in over 5 miles a second it's the first time we've had other human beings in another spacecraft able to take our picture we fly underneath the Mir slightly faster and then climb up in front of Mir Co altitude where we eventually slow down and fly co- speed we fly the first third of the Rendevous from the front part of the cockpit just like they do on the Enterprise uh you do all the burns with the computers computer guided and and automatically controlled and then we fly to the or float to the back of the the vehicle turn around look a and and fly the remaining portion of it manually this is Valerie polakov he's the Cosmonaut who's been up there over a year now and we'll soon uh set a record uh this is Elena kova uh speaking to us on the shuttle in fact all the astronauts got a chance to uh speak in our VHF radio uh to the cosmonauts on mirror it was very motivating as Jim climbed up towards the the vbar that's basically the horizontal line tangent to the Earth where we going meet up with Mir I was ranging with the laser and meanwhile they were looking at us coming up and this is something we only saw when we came back and we appreciate how dramatic it is in fact what you're seeing here is sped up uh twice normal speed just so that we can uh show it quickly but I think even so you can feel how um how dramatic that is in the foreground there you see the the the uh dark metal ring that's a an adapter on the mirror for scientific instruments and then at the bottom right that's scientific instrument I think it's a telescope once we're at about 400 ft um Jim arrested the approach to the Mir and uh we basically station kept there for a few minutes before we started our timed approach once that time came up uh we basically had a a window to make and I kept us straight uh we were flying range rate commands using another laser tracking system the trajectory control sensor um in the middle of the bay ranging off the docking port here which is the white cross and Jim will tell you what he's doing there this is a view taken from one of the payload Bay cameras and it shows how stable the Orbiter is as it approaches to the Target very few inputs were required uh we saw no motion from the solar rays you see the solar rays sing we were in the low z mode essentially not pluming the station uh we of course didn't want to damage something this beautiful uh and again you can see how precise the Orbiter is we didn't do very much it just stayed in the right place it's a little bit easier to fly than the simulators and that's good this is the view out of the window at about 37 ft and you can see Vladimir and I are both um crashing into each other trying to get as good a shot as the other this is a pan that Vladimir made um and you can see the windows there's Elena kova with her knee yes Elena kova and me we wave each other and for you of course uh I don't know who was it is somebody know New onard Station this is Valerie poov and this is Commander Alexander venka all of the time with the camera and uh uh show the movie make movie movie this is uh uh his picture from station mirror again it shows how well the vehicle has been designed uh after we uh remained at our closest point of approach uh for about 10 minutes with the my uh crew members helping me to make sure that we didn't go one inch closer than the flight Ro limit of 10 meters you can see the solar aray sing again no motion at all from our Jets we saw no interaction after 10 minutes we backed away uh and proceeded out to 450 ft and initiated a fly around as as a photo survey in fact this is one of the harder things for uh Jim and I to S talk about in the cockpit as we backed away miror maneuvered uh so that we no longer had a Center Line towards the docking port and at 450 ft we started to climb up above it and behind it uh in our orbit plane so that we would do a full circle around it basically trying to stay at 450 ft during this time however using the laser which was the handheld laser which is the thing that a traffic cop would use to catch you for speeding um we basically couldn't find many reflective items on the mirror to get a range off and so uh we basically had to move out a little bit further than we first planned because of that uncertainty but it was no problem I think for Jim if anyone has any doubts about what we're doing in the teacher uh let us assure you that we are on the right track you you can't help but see a vehicle like this that's been up since 1986 it's just stunning just breathtaking and and it it really tells us that we're doing the right thing we had met the Russian people before we launched and they're very proud of their space program they know a lot about our space program and we of course are very proud of our space program uh and it's time to join our forces and make both of our programs better this is what 17,500 milph looks like from the top we have P Bay lights on board the shuttle that help illuminate the mirror we could see it at 600 feet and you'll see in the next shot if you watch the top upper right corner of the screen you'll see the Jets on the mirror firing we can see this all the structure and things very clearly at night without any help look up right up in their top right corner what's going on there is it's D it's um they have gyroscopes basically on the mirror to give it attitude control and at some point they become saturated and then they fire jets to desaturate the Gyros this is our parting shot and it was a pretty sad moment I think we' had a long day it was busy but one of the most exciting days in my life I must say the second major activity we had on this was the Spartan satellite it had an UltraViolet telescope that's on the right side of the Box the gold box you saw in that picture on flight day two we took it out of its station in the payload Bay to look at the shuttle it's looking at the ultraviolet glow on the surface of the tail of the shuttle Vladimir Tito you can see at the controls on the robot arm here he's flying the Spartan up above the nose of the shuttle so it can look back at the tail and it Jets on the tail to Fire and watch their glow on flight day five we release Spartan so it could go look at some Stellar objects again Vladimir Tito is flying the arm here we let the Spartan go and then we watch it to make sure its attitude control system is working properly when that's all been checked out Jim flies the shuttle away at about 1 foot per second which allows Spartan to drift about 40 miles in front of the shuttle where it can perform its observations undisturbed by the shuttle environment the ultraviolet uh telescope will be looking at diffuse nebula and other intergalactic objects which can't be easily observed from the ground you can see us doing ranging marks and looking at the Spartan to make sure all the deploy is going well you see it in the center of the screen that little black square is sparting on its way this is Mike and I preparing for uh our big event at least it was my favorite thing on the mission and that was the Eva uh we have to pump the suits up uh without any bodies in it to make sure it's not leaking and then uh get uh ready for prep here I'm attaching electrodes to my chest both Berard and I wore these during the Eva it's so that our flight surgeons can monitor our heartbeats during The Space Walk and here we are getting ready for our for our hang on the wall while we uh get to look at each other and uh tell each other stories after they wave goodbye to us we had to get right back on getting Spartan retrieved Jim was flying the ru here and you can see Spartan coming up the robot arm is in the bottom center of the screen I'm performing The Retreat Reve at this point I'm using the camera on the robot arm which is the view that you see here to get a good eye on how Spartan is coming close that's me at the robot arm you see the trajectory at the bottom right corner of the screen there that's the approach that we flew the part I'm trying to grab is actually the bottom center of the screen I'm using the Target in the middle of the screen in order to aim and adjust my attitude properly so I can get a hold of Spartan that all went very smoothly job did Jim did a superb job of setting me up for this grapple once we got a hold of spart and we then put it back in the payload Bay there had been some concern before the flight because earlier flights had had some problems with the latching mechanism they had changed the hardware before this flight and we were hoping it all went well and indeed it did it went right down into the guides and latched up on the first attempt which was good news for the Eva guys champing at the bit to get out in the payload Bay and chomping we were Bernard and I kept on looking at each other as the RMS slowly did its thing but here we are we got outside we were very happy we waved at the camera and started our thermal evaluation well I was the first guy on the arm I got in with no problem you see the arm is outfitted with a pad and uh once I got safely in I grabbed a hold to mik and by the way we're we are tethered uh shortly after that uh vogi lifted us both up about 30 ft above the the cargo bay for the coal soak and during this time frame actually neither Bernard nor myself felt particularly cold anywhere it was only when we started to unbirth the Spartan and we moved into darkness at the same time here you see me on the end of the RMS uh moving it a little bit closer to Bernard so he can grab a hold of it with a small handing tool and perform his uh Mass handing evaluation during this time I had full control once Mike handed it off to me it was my job to take this almost 3,000 lb object satellite and wave it back and forth in the air I only weigh about 250 lb and or 205 lb I should say he's getting lighter all the time God I don't weigh 250 lb they wouldn't let me go in the shuttle so it was a it's not as an easy task as you may think uh even though it didn't weigh anything it does have a lot of mass and uh you can see here my initial starts and stops I did not have the uh the satellite very square and it was sort of a steep learning curve uh at the very beginning after a while I got the hang of it and uh then it became uh pretty pretty easy but the only way you can move masses like this is very very slowly I must say Bernard did it extremely well initially he said he had a lot of concern about doing it even slower than we had practiced on the air bearing floor but uh as far as I could tell he moved it without uh crosscoupling anything uh towards the end of his Mass handing evaluation I was steadily getting cold while watching him and so we ended up uh birthing the Spartan because of specifically very cold hands on my part and I think Bernard had cold feet after we've been told to do the uh the birth Bernard was able to practice his thumble mittens evaluation uh after I did that then it was uh Mike's turn on the RMS he had been up there uh freezing his toes and hands off at this point and um he did actually did a close pass over IMX camera that we had in the payload Bay so you'll see some nice footage of that later one of the things we do on every flight is look out the windows and take pictures for Earth observations folks one of our important jobs in the space program is to monitor the Earth's environment you can see glaciers here in the southern Andes Patagonia area it's an area that we don't see very often on shuttle flights because we don't go to the high inclination that we had we were at 51.6 Dees this kind of terrain is a very interest to the Russian co-investigators on this flight because of the glaciers and watching the water runoff but we do eventually have to come home ours was an 8-day flight morning of flight day nine we packed up to go home we had one last chance to say goodbye to the Mir space station you'll see it in the center of this Frame and then you'll see a meteorite go by shuttle has unique experience of having meteorites go below it if you think asent is exciting or the miror revo is exciting you wouldn't believe entry the only way to take out the energy that we have put into the vehicle on lift off is to come slamming into the atmosphere there are not many molecules up high but the ones that are there are screaming hot when you hit them and you see the pink glow outside the windows The Flash is caused by the attitude control jets uh firing you'll see a scene looking back aft on this 25m trailing plume of fire as we come flying into the atmosphere uh it was pretty dramatic for us because it was a night entry uh we saw the sun as we approached the hack just briefly the large turning Circle so most of the entry was at night the sun peaked its little head above the Horizon and then dipped below again as we descended in our 100 ton glider with the lifted drag ratio of worst than 4:1 and reverse flight path control uh but the system is very very smooth you see the turbulence uh from inside the 20 million candle power Xenon lamps down in the runway Illuminating the runway of course from where we were it looked like day time uh early morning you'll see uh again flying over the threshold of the runway you see some of the turbulence but the vehicle handles it very well it takes out all of the gust and turbulence you see some of the railing Edge vortices coming off of the wing tips in the next shot as we roll down the runway ien will deploy the drag shoot and it dis reefs just prior to nose wheel touchdown which helps to reduce the loading on the main wheels and the nose gear see the shuttle Chase airplane flying by Mike said he could see some of the flash bulbs going off on the side I wasn't looking in that direction Jim always told us not to look out the window but I blew it I might add that you feel quite heavy after coming back to Earth spending over a week in zero gravity when I took my helmet off it felt like it weighed almost 75 lbs after Ian uh got rid of the drag sheet was the first time we had used the brakes the system is so good we will uh show our slides at this time and then we'd love to answer any questions that you may have uh again this is a spectacular night launch uh with all that thrust and power underneath the system worked very well we had no problems until after we got in orbit and that's a testament to all the folks who worked on the on the systems here at JSC and around the NASA centers a launch Plane uh in and and our high inclination dictate that we had only a f- minute launch window these are the kind of things that we'll be doing every time we fly to me we'll have just a FIV minute launch window again I'd like to thank my crew for uh helping me on this Mission I simply uh did what they told me to do and the vehicle was so good that that it was all pretty easy uh we should have no trouble in the in the future on these missions again setting up for the Rendevous we do the first portion of it up in the front cockpit this is the commander seat on the left for the second run we switched the rolls and Eileen took over the commander seat and did the I should add that during this time we were kept on trying to uh make Jim feel better about the jet Le this was a topic of conversation almost every night day transition in our orbit we'd be looking out the back window and he say is it still leaking we go yes Jim he try and smile and I guess he's trying to smile here too of the 44 steering jets that we have on the Orbiter we had problems with three three of them uh one of them had failed off and two of them were leaking there was a forward jet that started leaking on flight day two and this is a procedure that I'm working here um that one we were able to heal uh fortunately because it was a required jet to do the randevu inside of a th000 ft uh we cycled the manifold once and uh ran this procedure we hot fired the jet three times and we managed to heal that leak so you probably didn't hear much about that on the ground um and also this would be a good point for me to to mention all the great support that we got from our flight controllers and our Engineers here on the ground and also the managers that worked very hard and very long hours working over in Russia with our Russian colleagues everybody wanted this approach to happen um the Russians and the Americans alike and we did everything we could and uh and of course the crew worked hard but we have great thanks to pass on to the people here on the ground that allowed this mission to uh go all the way into 33 ft and be a complete success um first radio contact we had with station we had on distance approximately 550,000 ft from the shuttle uh the connection was stable and um the first time we saw the station when uh it was about 50 mi from us before the sunset we saw a bright star in the direction of our velocity vector and first we had a discussion on uh if it was the planet Jupiter or station but um in that period of time um we were um not sure but after the sunset the star disappeared and which mean what it was a station and we were approaching it and uh I would be able to see my space home on this picture you can see the station which is located about 400 ft from the shutle shuttle before the sunset the Final Approach of th F started during the W orbital night and when we began that approach I must say personally uh it was hard to realize what we were actually doing you know approaching the Mir it such a spectacular site and yet we had a pretty technical job to do at this time and so I would concentrate with the handheld laser um at pointing straight out the docking port as you see it in the lower part of the scene there and call out ranges and range rates to Jim while he very carefully maintained a corridor and flued in this is the target you see the standoff cross in the center of the picture uh which we use for angular alignment and and translational alignment we fly the approach uh with the attitude control system and automatic pilot and and we fly manually the translational control system again it was very stable uh and and fairly easy easy to do even in the ly mode which reduces the plume on mirror and this picture is made from the distance of approximately 35 ft in the window of station you can see the face of Dr Valerie poov um I had some experience working with him for four months during my year flight but now he got so brave that he even beat the record of the ler space flight with my flight engineer and I set it in 1988 it has just been a little over 13 months of uh uh him walking in Space nonstop this side of mirror represents the eyes of the station because this is the place where the main windows are located uh this is the place where video equipment is located and uh where the crew can watch the Earth on the top of the station in Middle is this some top one moment this one uh you can see uh green color uh Circle but uh like looks like a window but it's not like not window with this hedge of the IR loock with a small IR loog which the crew used for performing experience outside uh the stating stating uh it is also used for um tress dis U disposal if uh it's necessary after we had spent some time uh close up to Mir and uh we talked a lot on the radio and had taken many pictures we then had to start the second part which was the fly around and Jim backed away to uh 450 ft and then started a slow climb around the uh the mirr up and over it during this time I think Janice was taking some uh IMAX film footage that um IMX film footage that Mike mentioned will be ready in a couple of weeks and it's going to be beautiful uh my job during this whole uh Rendevous was to be in the spacehab with cameras at both sides firing pictures as fast as I could we have a lot of beautiful photos and I have to tell you that the the photos don't do uh the beauty of this station Justice at all it really is gorgeous uh this is uh the station as we're doing our separation burn and and getting ready to leave M spacehab as we mentioned in the film was one of our other major activities on the flight this is the AFT Port end of the spacehab module you can see the general setup with the lockers that contain experiments and the wall to the right of the slide that has things like procedures in our trash areas this is Vladimir Tito working on one of our life sciences experiments on board there were a variety of different experiments both in the ma on the mid deck this is an example another class of experiments that we did a radiation monitoring experiment that Jim our chief scientist on board was operating he loved that title we made we made Jim an honorary scientist on this flight there were also a large number of experiments on the mid deck even though they are spacehab experiments they're stowed on the mid deck so they can have easy access for change out of chemicals right before we launch it's much easier to get in the mid deck than all the way back into the space have module and this shows a variety of different experiments the silver boxes are refrigerators the top Center one holds a protein crystal growth experiment the middle right one is the vapor diffusion apparatus that we saw earlier the gold boxes in the center of the screen are accelerometers that we use to measure the environment of the space Shel to help people better understand what kind of experiments can best be done on board the third major area we had on board was the Spartan satellite this was the attached Ops on flight day two where we're using the telescope that you can see on the right hand side of the box box the gold box to monitor the shuttle environment the glow on the tail and the RCs Jets firing then on flight day five Vladimir Tito deployed Spartan as we you saw in the film it drifted away for a couple of days and we went back to pick it up this is me on the retrieve day flight day seven at the robot arm controls as I'm getting ready to grab a hold of Spartan and put it back in the bay for our anxiously awaiting Eva guide my Knights in White armor I I mentioned in the movie that Bernard and I tried to avoid looking at each other and telling each other stories cuz we'd already heard a lot of our stories before then um in fact for 4 hours we were having to do a pre-breathe uh the cabin was kept at 14.7 uh pounds per square in atmospheric pressure so it wouldn't disturb the experiments and for that reason we had to get rid of the nitrogen in our bloodstream by breathing Puro 2 for uh 4 hours it was actually not as bad as I expected um you're more comfortable in space um speak for yourself I did notice that Berard tried to sleep more than I did during this period of time um on on my left arm there I'm in the lower left on my left arm there's a a boxy looking Contraption called the electronic cuff checklist and it's a device that basically lets us pull up with menus um the activities we're going to perform during the Eva and also some uh contingency procedures and I spent my time bothering Bernard going through all of our Eva Flight Plan by uh walking with that checklist we also monitored their conversation on one of our Loops this was during the Spartan retrieval and these guys just cracked me up I think I talked about this on the movie um when we first came out uh we had a major task and that was the outfit the RMS with this pad what we call pad and Contraption here and there's a special uh device which we hooked to the RMS and then we then put a a portable foot restraint on and then we had a thermal Cube that measured ambient temperature uh the objective of this this Eva we had several objectives but the major objective was the thermal evaluation and that was we were told go outside guys turn your heat all the way up and stay out there until you get coal and uh if you followed us uh we got Cal fairly quickly and that's not hard uh to do uh when you're facing deep space and we're talking about temperatures of an excess of 2.7 K Mike is holing my a 2.7 Kelvin I I have no idea what that is it's very cold but it's very cold it's greater than about 100us 130° F now that I do understand we have some preliminary um um temperatures from the sensors that we had in our gloves and uh it shows that it was lower than 20° inside our gloves in the suit so pretty cold this is a a picture I tried to take or took with the Hasselblad um while I was basically floating free Bernard had a hold of me with one hand um and it was surprisingly stable much more stable than the water tank I was trying to take shots one-handed with the hassleblad and uh unfortunately I got his feet those are my feet right and they're big too but uh cuz there's there was a tremendous view for me and Bernard while we were doing this particularly uh with the Earth behind Bernard uh I I will always remember this for the rest of my life just how breathtaking that was because we were still in earthlight we were not getting as cold as we had pumped ourselves up to think we would be and in fact I was starting to get overconfident about this I guess when they thought about bringing us down at the end of this 15-minute evaluation we both gave ratings I think of the order of just slightly cool or or normal um before we were brought down into the bay for the mass handing evaluation it was shortly after we were brought down uh in the bay I got off the RMS and then Mike got into the RMS and then you see me uh here to the right side of of Spartan uh we had uh foot restraints on each side of these and those are always on the Spartan inest uh just in case um people like Janice and Bel have trouble birthing it uh then we could do an Eva and actually re birth it uh shortly after that Mike was sort of hanging freely uh we went into a night pass and that's when it really got cold uh at that point I was I had the Spartan in hand and actually going through the mass hling that I described in the movie um and I guess that whole sequence was around 10 or 15 minutes into the night pass uh when we both started noticing that our fingers and feet were getting colder and colder and uh it's about that time that we asked iene to move us to a colder a warmer attitude that is uh but in space at night there is no warmer attitude here you see me uh basically doing uh one of the experiments I was working on in the mid deck the solid surface combustion experiment it's basically um two uh Cinema basically movie machines that uh take pictures of a a flame propagating ac across a solid surface and this was a very simple experiment for me to do appropriate to my capabilities this is uh an experiment uh I'm not going to go into telling you exactly what it is but look at all this contraption look at all this as a medical doctor I was glad that I wasn't the subject in this because it had so many wires and gadgets that I had to connect to these guys it took a while to get him outfit it he did it to Vladimir too but the good news is while he's working madly trying to get get all those wires connected I'm just floating there having a great time this actually this device in in short basically uh was an um electr biogram which actually placed electrodes over the muscles to uh get an idea of how they respond to microgravity so you can actually if you move your arm you can actually look at the waveform so it's a very uh sophisticated device very portable the thing that doesn't show up on here is Janice is also wearing some nice little ski boots at least that's what they look like and these were to apply some pressure to the bottom of her feet to simulate um standing uh on the earth and uh we're still waiting on the data to come back on that even in space you can't get away from paperwork actually this system worked out pretty good this is our fax machine and uh we call it tips and every morning uh Mission Control would send messages up to us mainly uh changes to our flight plan updates to procedures we got messages to cheer us up and as one example of the other types of messages we get the Earth observation people would send us information on that day and ground scenes that we'd be passing over that they'd like to see pictures of along with what camera and what f-stop we should use a lot of our flight was over water but we did get some nice shots of things over the land this is the blue and white Niles coming together the White Nile is the wider River to the left of the screen and the area in the middle all the little dark triang rectangles that you see in the center bottom of the screen is cotton growing areas this is the city of cartoon which spans the Blue Nile on the right side of the screen and this is one of the largest cotton growing areas in the world these glaciers were so impressive to us that we decided we'd add another uh picture in our slideshow uh you can see see one right here in the middle emptying into a lake and also down here in the bottom emptying into a lake and they actually start from an altitude of over 10,000 ft again this is uh in Chile and Argentina uh South America and if you look at the history of these areas if you go back thousands and thousands of years uh the scientists tell us that these glaciers actually flowed into where the lake is and the lakes were formed by the glaciers and you know flying on the shuttle and taking these pictures in both the visual and infrared range we can uh really get a lot of information to the scientists and learn about uh the history of our Earth it's um this island called The Herd Island this is approximately 51 52° South this is maybe Souther um island in the Indian Ocean all of the time uh this island and the Gan Island uh under the Cloudy and uh this picture interesting uh you can see uh cloudy waves gravity waves and the beginnings of f Carman Vortex srl up here