STS-70 Day 5 Highlights

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On Monday, July 17, 1995, 7:30 a.m. CDT, STS-70 MCC Status Report # 08 reports:

The Space Shuttle Discovery continues to travel smoothly around the globe as the five men and women on board began a fourth full day of work with biological and materials processing experiments.

The four Ohio natives and one New Yorker were awakened shortly after midnight CDT to the fight song for the Cleveland Indians, "Talkin' Tribe." Mission Specialist Mary Ellen Weber responded with "Good mornin' Houston, how `bout them Indians?"

Mission Specialist Nancy Currie sent down video images of developing Medaka fish eggs as part of the Space Tissue Loss experiment and filled out responses to a human factors research project looking at ways to optimize astronaut performance on orbit. Weber checked on the progress of the Bioreactor Development System, which is growing human tissue samples better than Earth-bound methods.

Commander Tom Henricks and Pilot Kevin Kregel continued to work with alignment of the HERCULES camera using star sightings. So far, they have not succeeded in accomplishing alignment, which is required to calibrate the HERCULES geolocation equipment.

The crew also took time to answer questions from CNN reporter John Holliman, and to voice down answers to queries posed by Internet surfers visiting NASA's Shuttle Web.

On Monday, July 17, 1995, 4 p.m. CDT, STS-70 MCC Status Report # 09 reports:

Discovery's crew passed the halfway point of their mission today, continuing to encounter minimal problems as they worked on a variety of experiments.

The crew again today worked with the HERCULES video camera and the WINDEX observations of Shuttle glow. With HERCULES, the crew continued to have difficulty performing star alignments but have obtained very good Earth views, gathering 95 percent of the data planned for the investigation thus far, according to the experiment's sponsors. For WINDEX, Commander Tom Henricks fired Discovery's thrusters to allow the instrument to record the effects of such firings on the glow seen around Shuttle surfaces.

The only problem reported by the crew today was a faulty vacuum cleaner cord that caused a circuit breaker to trip aboard the spacecraft. While performing some routine cleaning onboard, the breaker tripped and the crew found several cuts in the cleaner's electric cord. The crew plans to splice the cord together, removing the nicked portions, and test it out after checking with flight controllers tomorrow.

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