STS-81
Report # 16 
Sunday, January 19, 1997 5:30 p.m. CST 
 
The crews of the docked Atlantis-Mir complex were awakened at 5:27
p.m. CST to the song,."So Long, Farewell," from the musical "The Sound
of Music"; and quickly began making final preparations for
undocking, scheduled for 8:15 p.m. CST.

Commander Mike Baker, pilot Brent Jett and mission specialists Jeff
Wisoff, John Grunsfeld and Marsha Ivins will be joined by John Blaha
on their return to Earth. After four months aboard the Russian
outpost, Blaha said farewell to Mir 22 Commander Valery Korzun, Flight
Engineer Alexander Kaleri and the newest Mir crewmember, astronaut
Jerry Linenger, when the hatches on the two spacecraft closed at 6:46
a.m. today.

Atlantis will conduct a fly-around inspection of Mir after it undocks,
flying in a tail-forward attitude at a distance of about 400
feet. Atlantis' maneuvering jets will be fired about two hours later,
separating the multipurpose space truck from Mir. Alantis will return
on the sixth Shuttle-Mir docking flight in May with Linenger's
replacement, British-born astronaut Mike Foale.

After the undocking and flyaround are complete, the Atlantis
astronauts will once again set up the Treadmill Vibration Isolation
System (TVIS) to test its ability to keep astronaut exercise sessions
from disturbing sensitive experiments on the International Space
Station. Mission managers are keeping open the option of a mission
extension day if required to glean all necessary data from the TVIS
test. The crew has not been able to recover data from a previous test
on Tuesday.

At 6:24 a.m. CST Monday, crew members will participate in an interview
by the Internet magazine."Mungo Park," in which reporters will forward
questions posed by on-line participants. A wealth of shuttle
information can also be found on the NASA Shuttle Web at
http://shuttle.nasa.gov.

The Atlantis-Mir complex continues to orbit the Earth at an altitude
of 240 miles.




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