STS-70 Day 6 Highlights

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On Tuesday, July 18, 1995, 7 a.m. CDT, STS-70 MCC Status Report # 10 reports:

Discovery's crew downlinked video images of bioreactor tissue cultures that were described as better than any seen before by investigators who are working to qualify the machinery for use on orbit. The video showed orange colon cancer cells coalescing into globules, some of which were described by Mission Specialist Mary Ellen Weber as being as large as a pea.

Bioreactors are extensively used by researchers on Earth to grow three-dimensional cell cultures that cannot be produced by traditional culture methods. The Bioreactor Development System is being used to determine how effective the equipment is for supporting tissue growth with minimal cell damage.

Pilot Kevin Kregel and Mission Specialist Don Thomas spoke with the "Good Day, America" radio show out of Boston today, and answered several questions posed by visitors to NASA's Shuttle Web site on the Internet.

The crew also made HERCULES and WINDEX observations. Although several attempts to align the HERCULES Inertial Measurement Unit were unsuccessful, a previous alignment continued to allow geolocation of targets below with sufficient accuracy. Commander Tom Henricks twice fired Discovery's thrusters to allow the instrument to record the effects on the glow seen around shuttle surfaces in an effort to identify methods for protecting sensitive instruments from the phenomenon.

The crew repaired a faulty vacuum cleaner cord that had tripped a circuit breaker, although it will not be necessary to use the vacuum again during the flight. For most flights, the vacuum is used only three times -- early in the flight, at the midway point and just before landing -- to clean dust and debris from air circulation filters. The crew will use the sticky side of multipurpose gray tape available on board to clean the filters if necessary.

On Tuesday, July 18, 1995, 5 p.m. CDT, STS-70 MCC Status Report # 11 reports:

Discovery completed another trouble-free day on orbit as the crew continued to tend a host of experiments ranging from optical studies to biological investigations.

Today the crew activated one study for the first time thus far, the Microencapsulation in Space experiment, a device that will attempt to produce a timed-release antibiotic medication in weightlessness. The lack of gravity allows the encapsulation process to be performed with much greater purity than can be achieved on the ground, according to experimenters. The automated investigation will operate while the crew sleeps.

Earlier, the crew downlinked video images of bioreactor tissue cultures that were described as better than any seen before by investigators who are working to qualify the machinery for use on orbit. The video showed orange colon cancer cells coalescing into globules, some of which were described by Mission Specialist Mary Ellen Weber as being as large as a pea. The bioreactor is a rotating cylinder in which cells can be grown suspended in weightlessness aboard the shuttle thus making them more perfect than ground-grown cultures. The bioreactor experiment has now moved to its second phase, an observation of the currents created in the fluid inside the device that uses colored plastic beads to record the movements.

Also in the morning, the crew noted a small nick on the outside of one of the shuttle's exterior window panes apparently caused by the impact of a micrometeorite sometime during the sleep period. The tiny crater is estimated to be only a sixteenth of an inch in diameter and one thirty-second of an inch deep, posing no problems for the spacecraft. The exterior window pane alone is more than half an inch thick, and several more window panes -- together almost two inches thick -- are located between the exterior and the interior of the cabin.

In other work, the astronauts continued observations of Earth using the HERCULES video camera and of the shuttle itself using the Windex experiment. Windex observed the environment around the shuttle during a simultaneous waste and excess drinking water dump from the spacecraft.

Mission Control put the crew to bed for the day with the theme from the movie Starman. The eight-hour sleep period began at 2:42 p.m. CDT today. The crew will awaken at 10:42 p.m. tonight.

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