STS-67 Postflight Presentation (1995)

we launched uh in the middle of the night on a night when uh when we were kind of wondering whether we were going to go fly or not uh we finally got to go ahead and suit up this is my favorite piece of gear to put on um very very comfortable here's Borneo putting it on his suit for his first flight you see John grunsfeld on the right everybody's raring to go uh we had a sort of a marginal call from the weather guys for those of you that followed it uh Sam on the left and Ron on the right we're all kind of thinking that U this is sort of a dress rehearsal for the real launch day which would probably be the next day Tammy putting her suit on and Wendy suex did just a marvelous job um I think we may be one of the last flights that actually wears the Lees as we get ready to go into the Asus suits but um we were all fired up and ready to go and lo and behold we went to fly here we are starting the main Engine 7 seconds before a launch of course a little over a million pounds of thrust there two srbs you see the twang maneuver Steve in the left window two srbs lighting basically 4 and half million pounds of weight and 8 million pounds of thrust pushing us upwards instant daylight obviously you can see how well we illuminated things John and Wendy were able to actually see the Launchpad the smoke plume and the coast by looking back through a mirror and obviously a majestic site for everyone as we quickly disappear from sight here and approximately 2 minutes we approached the SRB sep which of course gave us a beautiful view of the forward Rockets as they separated inside and we were we're on our way to orbit here we are a little over an hour into the flight just witnessing this beautiful view of the Earth but flight day one is extremely busy and so we needed to get to work we opened our payload bay doors a little over an hour into the flight and then soon we'll be uh activating our space lab pallet and activating our instrument pointing system all of which is done from the a flight deck once we attach our telescopes to the instrument pointing system we deploy that uh IPS and instruments to the upright position and then a little bit later on we'll be doing a thorough checkout of the IPS um and also a checkout of all our ultraviolet telescopes in preparation for the next 15 days of astronomical observations um on the from the leftand side I work the IPS side and Sam on the right hand side is uh doing the in the instrument check out we were able to very quickly settle into the routine I was responsible for making sure the Orbiter was pointed at the right part of the sky Tammy was responsible for fine tuning with the instrument pointing system and then the telescopes would lock onto the Target and you might be wondering why we're looking at the Earth but we're currently rolling to the right attitude the idea was that we would pick up a star as it Rose above the Earth's Limb and then Sam would go to work making sure the experiments were ready to start the observation and quickly we have the astar tracker on the left UI Hut is right in the middle and whoopy is on the right hand side a very very capable package of telescopes that really did an outstanding job we had a number of tools on board to help us uh evaluate how we were doing we communicated to the telescopes primarily through the small laptop computers um I'm issuing commands directly to the telescope and you saw Tammy issuing commands to the instrument pointing system um this is what we would see through the Hopkins ultraviolet telescope it had a TV camera that actually looked out through the telescope and here you see an acquisition of the planet Jupiter we're actually looking at the space around Jupiter and displayed below that was a spectrum that we were actually acquiring um here you see the Wisconson ultraviolet photop polarimeter experiment in the foreground and this is the type of image we would get from the whippy instrument this shows a star um in the acquisition camera and in addition we had the spectral data from whoopy also Al to evaluate the target to make sure that we were looking at the right Target and the data was good well what ended up being a very very short checkout period um we got into the routine of observing Target after Target for for the uh rest of the mission John and I were the red shift um uh backend of the bus operators with Borneo in the front and we uh would do a Borneo would do a maneuver of the Orbiter John would maneuver the IPS to the correct attitude turn the manual pointing controller over to me after the IPS maneuver was done and I would do the the uh Target acquisition on the CCTV displays and uh the telescopes would be set off on their way observing the the object and here again you see the CCTV displays that we had on board to make sure we had the right target this information was also available to the all the scientists on the ground and there was a huge team working at Marshall as well as all the folks here at Mission Control working and here we see our alternate payload specialist Scott fan and we were in regular communication with the aps's and the other folks at Marshall working the telescopes every day they'd send us up a few pages of of new information on new targets and and Target procedures and also all the Orbiter uh procedures and information and so that was uh part of our duties on board to incorporate that into the Rolodex and Tammy helping me out there that was uh part of our daily activities we also had uh as I mentioned the mid deck active control experiment and uh here you see it uh with the disturbance at the far end on the right there disturbing the whole structure and that's free floating or near free floating the mid deck and just a second you'll see the control take over and the left hand gimbal suddenly locks in even though the right hand is still disturbing and this was the way it worked most of the time quite well here's a case where the left hand side is supposed to be pointing inertially in space but obviously uh this is a oscillatory Divergent case where the control wasn't quite enough and you wouldn't if this were a space station I don't think you'd want to be aboard and and these were fun to watch but by far the minority and this was just a great interactive experiment as you can see by the expression on uh our Commander's face and uh Borneo Bill to the left there fortunately the other mid deck experiments were rather benign we just spent most of our time cleaning the filters on the protein crystal growth experiments you can see John you're participating in a medical DSO that was determining the function of the eyes and the head your Gaze on orbit he's definitely wired for sound in this scene and again Dr sarax also known as Ron talking to with with one of the many school contacts we spoke to schools literally around the world India South Africa as well as throughout the United States that was really again as John said one of the more enjoyable aspects and of course we'd had to include bill on the bike uh he had to arm wrestle the rest of us for time though he didn't live on the bike we actually made him work but it as I said before it was a great way to get some exercise and to relax while you're on orbit well that exercise is likely to make anybody hungry and some of us were hungrier than others as we see Borneo here was first in line at the galley uh red shift usually had dinner together we usually had a cocktail hour first where we all had a shrimp cocktail here you see a uh a blue shift the person coming in here probably didn't have enough breakfast trying to get somebody's food away from him and of course playing with food you know no matter how often your mom tell told you not to play with your food it's just impossible not to do that in space and uh you see Tammy here with a a fluid physics experiment uh some tropical punch floating free in the mid deck which he was able to vacuum up post haste and of course we don't have a shower on board and that's the best you can do earth observations as we said was one of the more enjoyable things to do and also an important part of the shuttle program and here is uh Wendy's famous Baron island volcano uh in the Andaman Islands and uh that was neat to look for that kind of stuff that was a great discovery for us to be able to report that to the ground again Shark Bay this is a larger view of it and from day to day we see variations both due to Tidal differences and also from the rain in Australia uh this is looking towards the South up at the very left end of the picture is Adelaide and uh some of the dry lakes in the air uh Lake Region uh and some of these also had water in them and uh we had both uh color visible film and infrared film and we took sometimes pairs of pictures of the same region uh we also had an opportunity on a number of passes to see the Hawaiian Islands uh Tammy showed you the o view here's the big island of Hawaii and uh on the top of the picture there uh on the volcano are a number of NASA observatories that also do astronomy and uh we really enjoyed taking the pictures this is another beautiful view of a sunset on orbit it takes about 90 minutes to orbit the earth and so one gets to see a sunrise or Sunset every 45 minutes and uh this is one of the storms that we witnessed in the South Central United States you're looking uh North is at the top of the screen to the left you can see Louisiana all the way up to Atlanta actually and on the right hand side of course is Florida and it's a very graphic depiction of city lights and storm activity eventually we have to come back home this is a graphic visualization of the pilot dto you can see uh an actual approach here on the computer screen working with the uh controller which is mounted to the existing stick on the Orbiter in addition to that prior to coming home we went ahead and did a check on the flight control systems and what we do is we do a check of all the Jets and also the flight control surfaces to make sure that the Orbiter does perform as advertised and here the three Orbiter folks Steve Wendy and myself are going through the flight control system checkout and you'll now see the elvon moving in the background and you can really feel this just shake the vehicle as it's land s back and forth against the hard stops and then the uh final step before we come home is to turn the orbiting Observatory back into a flying machine and it gets kind of hectic there when we're trying to pack everything away and uh then put our launch and entry suits back on and get ready to re-enter here you see uh Ron and I and our suits are us uh logo there putting Borneo in his suit uh once that's done then just before we deorbit we close the payload bay doors and uh seal the payload Bay so that we can re-enter the Earth's atmosphere as you're probably aware we were um originally scheduled to land uh at Kennedy Space Center on the 17th of March uh which would have been 15 and a half days on orbit unfortunately the weather in uh in Florida didn't accommodate that Landing so um we put the telescope away never did actually close the doors the m control center folks never put us into the suits because the weather was uh was so bad we didn't they didn't think that we had a chance at it uh the next day uh Saturday the 18th uh we made one look at uh the Kennedy Space Center waved off on the first rev uh and went ahead and burned to Edwards Air Force Base on the 2 theorbit Opportunity on the 18th uh there you could see the hack we're on final now into Runway 22 at Edwards and um the winds were a little bit Gusty at at Edwards uh you can see a little bit of the Dust coming off the lake beds but um but there wasn't an appreciable amount of turbulence we could feel uh a little bit of turbulence on Final uh and the right to left crosswind was definitely noticeable uh but nothing that wasn't well within the uh performance capabilities of the Orbiter and for those of us that have flown before uh there wasn't a whole heck of a lot of difference between an 8 day to 10day flight uh and a 17-day flight so um if there is a limit uh on the amount of time that people can go to space and come back and land an Orbiter we don't think it's at the 17-day point um it was a wonderful flight uh we had an orbitor that gave us virtually no no problems whatsoever uh the folks down at Kennedy Space Center uh should be very very proud of the Orbiter that they gave us uh we hope that we gave it back in pretty good shape to them so that they can turn it around for the next bunch of folks that go fly it um it was a tremendous adventure for us uh we were very pleased with the results U I had a a tremendous group of people to go fly with uh exceptionally talented group of folks and so if we could if we just go ahead and start the slides now okay the crew patch as traditional the rookies are pretty much responsible for the crew patch and uh and we think that they did just a great job pretty well tells the story of the mission has the telescopes uh which operated of course in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum uh three different instruments in the payload Bay that the science guys will tell you about in more detail later but we um we launched on the 2nd of March we really didn't think we were going to do that with the weather as it was uh when we got down there it was a night launch primarily because we were attempting to maximize the amount of observing time and as it turned out launching in the middle of the night uh minimized the amount of time that we were going to be in the South Atlantic anomaly uh during the nighttime passes so uh we went to the program the science guys did uh along with payLo Commander Tammy Jernigan and made the case for launching in the middle of the night and we did that we launched at 137 eastern time I guess we were minute late 138 eastern time on the 17th and I can tell you what or the the second it's um my second night launch and day launches are impressive night launches are really something it gets to be no kid and broad daylight uh down there at Kennedy Space Center for just a little while although Astro is uh sometimes talked about as an individual payload there are actually more than one instrument that uh come together to to make the The Observatory itself and in this picture we see uh starting from the left the the long conical sun shade you see there is actually part of a star tracker that we use for correcting image motion uh that are created by disturbances in the Orbiter um just to the right of that that you can see sort of in the back is the ultraviolet Imaging telescope which uh actually takes images of ultraviolet objects and it's it was built at Gard space flight center um and to the right of that the larger tube is the Hopkins ultraviolet telescope from John's Hopkins University and here's another view of the same telescopes um the same telescope package the Astro Observatory um the instrument you see in the foreground with the square aluminum baffle is a Wisconsin ultraviolet photo polarimeter experiment which we commonly just call Whoopi and uh on the to its right you see three small tubes um those are the baffles for the optical sensor package which was three star trackers that were used in conjunction with the instrument pointing system to help uh acquire stars and to guide on those uh guide stars during the observation this particular image if you look at the land mass below has special significance to astronomers this is in the Southern Hemisphere and see if I can figure out how to make this laser pointer work yeah okay right in here in this region um are all of are almost all of the large groundbased observatories in the southern hemisphere this is Northern Chile and right in this region in here is the Los companis Observatory the European Southern Observatory and just to the right over here is the interamerican observatory and uh you know much of the astronomy in the southern him osphere is conducted in this region uh or in Australia and so this picture has special significance to us and in fact the last time I flew on Aster one as we were flying over like this some people I was working with were down here making observations in Chile okay this is where I get to to introduce the crew members this has got um both of the orbital Pilots here Wendy Lawrence on the left of course and and Bill Gregory on the right and those two folks were on different shifts we were divided up into into two shifts and ran 24-hour operations on board the Orbiter uh for all 17 days that we were flying and Wendy was the blue shift pilot she was uh ran basically all of the orbital um Maneuvers that we did we had over 377 Maneuvers uh that supported the payload uh just a little over 400 Maneuvers all told for the flight uh Wendy basically loaded every single one of those on the blue shift uh build did all of them except for a few that I managed to screw up on the red shift and U and and they did an awesome job not only of uh of keeping track of the attitude timeline to make sure that the Orbiter was maneuvered properly to support uh the observations that the science folks wanted to make with the telescopes uh but also just in keeping the Orbiter clean uh doing all the things uh for the systems the um flash of aerator systems the uh Wastewater dumps all those kinds of things that you need to do uh in order to keep the uh Orbiter up and running uh to support science operations these guys were doing one on each shift Tammy Jernigan was the payload Commander uh for that matter still is the payload Commander until we managed to get the flight report written and uh and she uh was assigned to the flight uh both she and John were assigned before the Orbiter crew uh was even mentioned in context with STS 67 by about 6 months so Tammy was working all those issues with the payload Community uh at Marshall space flight center and at Goddard uh with all the science teams the principal investigators uh to try to get the operations in sync with the science uh early on and she did just an awesome job here you see her uh working with one of the many uh pgsc that we had these were dedicated to the payload we had three uh computers that were dedic ated to Astro and that was our primary interface with the space lab system the escos the subsystem operating software uh and the EOS the experiment uh software to work with the payloads we had the uh the escost running um primarily on the starboard side left side as you're looking at which was the MS station uh and then the experiment uh side was primarily run by the folks on the right side that being the PS okay speaking of one of the ps's um Ron per Dr Ron per and when we got back to Ellington I said that he had been assigned to Astro since the Earth cooled and that's not really completely accurate uh however he has been working Astro since he graduated from college which was shortly after the Earth cooled and basically the guy is an expert on Astro as you would suspect he flew on on Astro one U Back when Vance BR Vance bran and Guy Gardner and uh and Sam Durance all uh all executed the first mission here and so he was just a a tremendous source of knowledge not only on U which is his particular area of of expertise but on the other two payloads as well and uh and besides that he was just a great guy to go fly with always willing to uh to do anything that was required he and Sam both were the uh were the suit guys for post insertion and the orbit prep uh Sam and Ron were the folks that that got all the rest of us dressed in the morning here you see Sam on the right Sam Durant and John grunsfeld on the left John was a firsttime flyer as was both Wendy and Borneo Bill Gregory affectionately known as Borneo uh John was the other Ms he was the uh the blue shift guy that ran the uh the instrument pointing system uh starboard side F Flight Deck uh he's also forgotten more about the laptop computers than the whole rest of the crew combin ever knew uh and he was just a huge help in that area since we were operating about six of those things simultaneously to support the payload and the Orbiter Sam of course uh also flew on Astro one uh with Ron Van sky and Company uh and and as such was was another Super expert his uh primary area of expertise being uh Hut the Hopkins ultraviolet telescope uh which he works basically full-time at John's Hopkins the book you see Sam and I holding contains the target procedures we observed hundreds of targets and we had an individual procedure for each Target that was observed and as you can see we affectionately named this book The Rolodex since it became so full with all the new procedures that the ground Uplink and we had a little fun with it here in OG wherever we go uh Steve gets the opportunity to introduce all of us and because he does that we don't get a chance to brag about him so I'm going to take a second here to point out that Steve had flown twice previously this was his first flight as a commander and he took on the ambitious tore of going uphill with an all rookie Flight Deck his first time in the left seat and three brand new spanking astronaut wannabes fulfilling the the rest of the flight deck and did an ad admirable job of getting us uphill what uh Steve did was basically turn the uh the mission over to the uh red team and the blue team leaders and uh what he did was he supervised us and kept uh basically the ground in tune with what we were doing and and handling any of the problems and and this is a picture of him at work doing what he did best and that was keeping the ground informed via basically the same email that we use here on Earth and you can see he's typing on a keyboard and when issues came up Steve would use the magical keyboard to talk to the ground and uh we got some awesome results the Johnson Space Center and uh the folks in Huntsville Marshall did a wonderful job of helping us out when we were in a bind we also used this keyboard for uh communicating with other members of the astronaut office and our families and friends have an opportunity to introduce some of the mid deck experiments that we carried these gave an opportunity for Bill and myself to participate in some of the science operations I'm uh presently in front of what's called PCG test protein crystal growth thermal enclosure system that was one of the protein crystal growth experiments that we had unfortunately you can't see the other one which was PCGS test for single thermal enclosure system and this is another one of another flight in the long we hope long series of flights that will continue protein crystal growth on orbit it's had tremendous success as far as we know we had the same success in our flight they were certainly interested in having 16 days worth of protein crystal growth on orbit primarily we were growing crystals for drug research in this experiment and the locker that you see on top the other silver metal box is cix which stands for a commercial materials dispersion apparatus ITA experiment the unique thing about this experiment is is a commercially sponsored experiment in conjunction with the University of Huntsville Alabama at Huntsville and I'll let Bill continue to explain what we did with the cix experiment here we had a couple portions of the cix we had the box which you saw uh just above Wendy which was a thermal enclosure and then we also had a a pouch assembly that had a variety of syringes which contained different compounds and or life forms and what we did was once we got up on orbit we would push these syringes to activate and we would have corresponding syringes on the ground that would be activated at the same time and then later on in the mission we would deactivate by sending a fixer in by pushing the syringe a second time and so we were able to model both the ground and up in orbit exactly what was going on and we filmed these so that they could provide further analysis once we landed another uh mid deck experiment we had that uh was great and kept our commander busy almost the entire flight on the mid deck was the mid deck active control experiment and this is a uh a very very good payload that involved a lot of human interactivity uh built at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in collaboration with Langley and it's a control structure technology experiment and basically it was a long beam that at one end had a little gimbal assembly that would try and disturb the whole structure and at the other end the one that's closest uh to the left on the screen had a little pointing instrument in it and gimbals and the purpose was the disturbing end would try and shake the pointing end and some computer algorithms and Gyros and the gimbals would try and hold the pointing end very very stable and this is a model for all sorts of space structures uh this was a relatively lowcost experiment but from what they learned on our flight uh with all the runs that both o Borneo and some of the other crew members did we'll be able hopefully to leverage some great cost savings uh for building very large satellites such as some of the earth observation systems or space stations or spacecraft uh to head out and explore the planets we also had a an experiment on board called sarx it's an amateur radio experiment and here you see wa4s AKA Ron P uh talking to one of the school groups on the ground and we had a record number of contacts and everyone uh I thought was truly excellent the kids asked and students asked just wonderful questions and it was uh really neat to be able to talk to them and give them realtime feedback uh we also had uh the C experiment hooked up to computers so people could log on to the Orbiter and and receive a little bit of information made over 12200 contacts where people were able to connect with the Orbiter and lots more where we were just able to talk to uh folks from all over the world as we passed over on on amateur radio one of the other experiments that we flew was the pilot and what you're looking at here is a computer workstation and just out of view are my hands holding a uh second stick and what this allowed us to do was through the course of the mission fly numerous approaches and landings to a simulated shuttle landing site and we're looking for possible degradation over the period of the 16-day mission additionally this allowed us to practice prior to the actual landing and uh Steve myself and Wendy were able to practice our crew coordination and our calls and kind of get back into the SLE as far as being prepared for our actual Landing unfortunately we were not SK to work all the time all of us had an opportunity to relax on the bicycle ergometer John's actually the one doing work and I'm having a lot of fun playing alongside it was a great way to to relieve stress like just like you would do down here on the ground uh we exercise throughout the day the Orbiter folks tended to exercise during the middle of our shift and we left the pre- and post leap period available for the payload crew to hop on the bike and I think every one of us would feel that we uh we really felt great post Landing because we had had an extensive opportunity to get on the bicycle and and pedal three of us had an opportunity to Pedal around the world that took about 95 minutes to do and we thoroughly enjoyed that the only problem with the current configuration of the bicycle is unfortunately you have to look at the Sleep stations uh if we had been able to set it up the other way we could have pedal around the world and actually looked at it at the same time but it really was a great way to to get some exercise and relax while you're on orbit and those of us on the blue shift had this wonderful opportunity every morning we got to see good old Borneo Bill wake up and climb up climb out of his sleep station we had uh four sleep stations installed which was really a wonderful thing for a dual shift flight and keep in mind that why half of the crew is up and working the other half of the crew needs to be asleep so we can conduct our 24 hour operations and the Sleep stations really provided you with a great way to get a good quiet night's sleep personally I never used earplugs and I slept great on orbit it was really kind of neat to be even though you're inside of a sleeping bag kind of a cocoon-like sleeping bag that's attached to the walls of the Sleep Station you can definitely tell that you are floating and I thought that was better than any water bed that I had been on well as I'm sure you hear from every crew one of the most exciting parts of any flight is looking out the window and the uh Earth observation program actually gives us a real requirement to do that so it's a it's a a great program and here you see John John and uh Wendy were our onboard film and Camera folks they made sure we had plenty of film loaded that the cameras were working great lenses were clean windows were clean and uh as Oz mentioned before we took over 7,000 70 mm frames most of which was uh Earth observation photography and one of the very pretty places that uh we flew over many many times in the daylight on this flight was Australia this is a view along the western coast of Australia of an area called Shark Bay uh Shark Bay is just a a beautiful area to look at from space there are a number of rivers this is a very Aid desert region and uh there are some rivers that flow into the bay and you see a lot of sediment U produced here see this work there we go there's for example River coming out here and you see the sediment plume coming out into the bay and uh all of this stuff here is uh lime and algae deposits that are built up in the bay but they have these tidal flows going through them that make uh very pretty patterns and this is uh further across Australia as our orbit carries us across Australia this is in the central region of Australia um which is very Aid and dry and you see here the Copper Canyon region uh Copper Creek region and normally these lakes or these rivers and lakes are dry um a few times every Century they flood and create these very wide flood planes and you can see the creek here the flood plane uh covers this wide area here um there have been a number of rains recently in Australia and you can see in the sunglint that a lot of the reals in this flood plane are filled with water you can see the sunglint off of the water and this Lake down here is a lake called yam Yama and it is in fact you can see water filling the lake um Australia actually did have quite a bit of water in it this time normally this area in Australia is quite dry and another thing we see from orbit are weather patterns this is uh a uh circulation around a low pressure area in the southern hemisphere you can see the uh as the air mass moves in toward the low pressure area it takes on this cyclonic circulation and you see here various lines of thunderstorms forming around the low pressure area itself this is one of my favorite places in the whole world um spent a lot of time there back when I was in the Navy in a previous life and here we see Mount Pinatubo and basically this uh this particular photo will be the Baseline for the coming raining season rainy season in the Philippines uh this is the big island of Luzan here's Manila Bay uh Manila is over here the batan peninsula of World War II Fame and of course Mount Pinatubo with the crater lake at the top it's bright blue and you can see the mud flows that have come down uh Clark Air Force Base is located right here you can actually see the runways uh there and all the mud flows that have um that have followed the eruption of Mount Pinatubo uh the particular area that I was interested in this is Subic Bay cubic Point Naval Air Station both Clark and and Subic Bay have been given back to the Philippine government now uh but we used to drop a lot of bombs on two Targets right out here and there's another Target right up this way there wasn't supposed to be a Target but one particular airwing Commander decided to make it to Target one afternoon which unfortunately it was a recreation area for the communication station and there a number of families fortunately on the other end of the island but U but obviously this is a place where a lot of folks currently in the astronaut office has spend an awful lot of time and it's a beautiful beautiful part of the world I have the oceanography background on the flight so they voted for me to discuss this slide we're actually looking at the Richie archipelago which is in the Andaman sea that's actually between India and Burma in the Bay of Bengal and because of the reflection of the sun off the surface of the water we're able to detect many features of the ocean in this case circulation patterns you can detect some of the current that's running along the shore and as Sam talked about weather patterns I in in the air mass the cyclonic circulation you can also have the same features that will develop in the ocean you'll have some circular patterns on the ocean surface DET detected by the sulit which we call edes other features that you can detect in this photo this is a large area in which you're which is experiencing a wind gust and the wind blowing over the surface is actually forming some linear waves that you can actually make out and I was quite surprised that we would be able to detect that amount of detail from 190 Mi above the surface and down here in the bottom unfortunately you can't quite make it out in the slide but there is a ship that is traveling out to sea and uh that was another fun thing for me to look out the window and try and look for ship wakes as a I'm not in my former life I'm I'm still in the Navy and I have a lot of friends who are out at Sea right now so I was trying to track down their boats also as an Orbiter pilot once you've got the maneuver kicked off you have a an opportunity to look out the window I did that as much as I could and this is my one claim to fame I was looking out the window on uh flight day six I think it was and we were passing over the andman islands and lo and behold saw this plume of smoke and realized we were looking at volcanic activity and this is Baron Island just to the east of the the Andaman island chain it had an eruption back in 1991 and it had a subsequent eruption in late 1994 and they had been tracking that and they were surprised to see that it is gaining in momentum at the rate that it is and the syian institution was interested in our subsequent observations and so any opportunity we had we grabbed the camcorder the aoflex and the the hos of Bloods and took lots of photos well this is a picture of the uh mighty Himalayas rooftop to the world and when I was a small boy I had uh two great dreams one of which was to fly in space and the other is to uh go climbing uh in the high Himalayas on an expedition and uh I think this is certainly the more exciting of the Expeditions but maybe someday I'll get down there but it was amazing from a couple hundred miles up to look down on this particular part of the earth and have a feeling for the great relief uh in the surface of the Earth there's you know tens of thousands of feet of difference between some of the lowline areas in the picture and the the top of the mountain uh it's just a really neat place to see and we saw an amazing variety of terrain you know as Wendy was talking about the the ocean surface uh with waves being measured in in just tens of feet to you know at the most hundreds of feet and here we have tens of thousands of feet it's really just a beautiful planet uh we also saw waves on the surface of sand and this is uh in Saudi Arabia and you can see really two prominent types of terrain here there are the the dunes both linear dunes and somewhat circular Dunes separated by areas where you see many many small green spots and those green spots are not natural the way the dunes are but are actually uh Farmers pumping water from under the ground up to the surface in Center pivot irrigation and creating very very tiny islands in the sand of uh agriculture so it's really very striking this is one of the more detailed photographs of hu at least that I've ever seen from space um you can see uh the of course Pearl Harbor and the International Airport um and you can also see waves breaking on the NorthShore on hu uh just a wonderful View and I'm hoping to get a little bit closer look up after we land excuse me a little bit later this year I'm still up there in spirit this is one of the views we were treated to um close to the end of our mission we have of course the instrument pointing system doing the fine job it did during the whole flight and of course the Orbiter performed beautifully our instruments operated very well and you can see in this Photograph if I can uh activate the pointer here here's the Earth glow it's about 95 kilometers above the surface of the Earth oh this is a moonlit View with a a wonderful uh Stellar background we were just delighted to be part of this Mission I'm very pleased that the uh Orbiter the instruments and the IPS perform so beautifully okay and every um every flight needs to have their sunset uh photo and to be perfectly honest with you we don't really know if this is a sunrise or a sunset um they really kind of look alike and you get 16 of them uh each every day and so there were a lot of them uh but they're pretty quick you got to you got to catch them in a hurry but it is just dazzling uh the amount of detail that you can get looking at the Earth's atmosphere uh with the sun in the background and uh and we were trying to count the layers of the atmosphere we finally figured out there were at least 10 that you could detect with the naked eye and um and I think you can probably see at least 10 of them here and it's always amazed me that these thunderstorms that usually are only 40 or 50,000 ft high that you can actually see those so very clearly uh with the naked eye uh in the atmosphere with the sun coming up or going down it's just a beautiful uh a beautiful way and it can actually distract you from what you're supposed to be doing if you're not careful uh it is so fantastic