STS-87 Day 13 Highlights

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On Monday, December 1, 1997, 6:00 a.m. CST, STS-87 MCC Status Report # 24 reports:

Following yesterday's decision by mission managers to forego a second deployment of the Spartan solar science satellite, the crew and flight control teams focused their attention on the final three days of the science portion of Columbia's STS-87 mission.

Continued work in the mini laboratory called the microgravity glovebox facility allowed crew members to interactively work with two different experiments today studying the formation of composite materials in an attempt to accurately map the roles of gravity-induced convection and sedimentation on the samples. Late in the work day, the study of the effects of different air flow velocities on the stability of an enclosed flame continued. These jet diffusion flames are similar to the kind used in industrial combustion processes and jet afterburners.

About three days of experiment work remains before the routine day before landing activities will require the attention of the crew members and the flight controllers. The United States Microgravity Laboratory experiments in the payload bay continue to operate normally, save the Advanced Automated Directional Solidification Furnace which was shut down for the remainder of the flight due to abnormal temperature readings in one of the samples being processed.

Yesterday's decision to pass up a re-deployment of the Spartan satellite was made to ensure a complete mission of the USMP experiments and to protect the shuttle's propellant margins.

Status checks continued today on the Collaborative Ukrainian Experiment investigating plant growth in space. Leonid Kadenyuk discussed the experiment with students from his home country in an early morning interactive event. He plans to conduct a similar educational event with U.S. students mid morning.

The six crew members are scheduled to go to sleep just before noon today and wake up at about 7:45 tonight.

On Monday, December 1, 1997, 7:00 p.m. CST, STS-87 MCC Status Report # 25 reports:

STS-87 mission managers Monday afternoon decided to add a second spacewalk to this mission, giving astronauts and EVA designers more confidence in techniques which will be important to assembly of the International Space Station.

Astronauts Winston Scott and Takao Doi will exit Columbia's airlock at approximately 2:15 a.m. CST Wednesday for a five-hour spacewalk which will repeat part of the crane operations, handling the smaller of the boxes which represent objects it will have to move during Space Station assembly.

Greg Harbaugh, acting manager of the EVA Projects Office at Johnson Space Center, explained in a press conference Monday that planners want to get as much confidence as possible that the movement of ORUs (Orbit Replaceable Units) can be done successfully. He noted that handling of the boxes during the first spacewalk did not give EVA designers all the information they needed. The original spacewalk timeline was modified last week to accommodate the retrieval of the SPARTAN satellite.

Another component of the second EVA will be checkout of the AERCAM SPRINT flying video camera which will be used during Space Station assembly and operations as a second point of view to observe work outside the station.

With the juggling of the crew timeline to add the second EVA, other mission activities have been rescheduled. After the astronauts awaken tonight at about 7:45 p.m. CST, their flight day 13 will include three hours of PEP operations (Particle Engulfment and Pushing), the MEPHISTO furnace experiment and SOLSE (Shuttle Ozone Limb Sounding Experiment) observations. The in-flight crew press conference has been moved earlier, now scheduled to begin at 4:36 a.m. CST. Media at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Kennedy Space Center.in Florida and in Kiev, the Ukraine, will participate.

Just before 9 a.m. CST Tuesday, Columbia's crew will reduce the cabin atmospheric pressure to 10.2 psi, giving Scott and Doi 16 hours of advance pre-breathe time which reduces their in-suit pre-breathe to just one hour.

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