Mcc Status Reports
...about 7:30 p.m. CDT. Before the Blue Team began its sleep shift, Ochoa conducted a checkout of the orbiter's robot arm during the early morning hours to ensure its health to support deployment of the SPARTAN-201 satellite on Sunday and retrieval on Tuesday. A couple of the steps in the checkout were postponed to allow enough time to conduct an "extended park" test leaving the arm in one position for a long period of time. The two postponed checkout steps will be conducted before SPARTAN operations. Discovery continues to circle the Earth every 90 minutes in a circular orbit of 160 nautical miles. ------------------------------[93-04-09a]------------------------------ MISSION CONTROL CENTER STS-56 Status Report #4 Friday, April 9, 1993, 4 a.m. CDT Pilot Steve Oswald late yesterday began initiating maneuvers aboard Discovery that have continued throughout the night to put the ATLAS-2 atmospheric instruments in position to observe the very first and last rays of each orbital sunrise and sunset. The maneuvers put Discovery in a solar inertial attitude, an orientation that means the shuttle's position is fixed relative to the Sun rather than to the Earth. However, when Discovery is on the night side of the Earth, Oswald rolls the spacecraft so the ATLAS-2 instruments point toward deep space to cool them after their extended exposure to direct sunlight. Members of the Blue Team -- Commander Ken Cameron, Pilot Oswald and Mission Specialist Ellen Ochoa -- have been on duty aboard Discovery during the morning. Early in the shift, Ochoa and Oswald completed a successful checkout of the shuttle's mechanical arm in preparation for operations early Sunday to deploy the SPARTAN platform and its solar wind-observing instruments. After the check, the arm was again put in an extended park position, posed above and to the left of the shuttle's nose. The arm will be kept in this position throughout the flight when it is not being used to avoid having it interfere in fields of view of the ATLAS-2 instruments. Cameron reported contacting students at the Royal Grammar School in Surrey, England, via ham radio of the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment as Discovery flew above that region of Earth. In addition, the Solar Ultraviolet Experiment, or SUVE, an experiment designed, built and that will be analyzed by students at the University of Colorado in Boulder, was activated late yesterday. SUVE studies how much ultraviolet radiation is absorbed by the upper layer of the atmosphere and attempts to correlate the amounts of radiation entering the atmosphere with sunspots, flares and other surface features of the Sun. Other work onboard during the night included photography using the HERCULES camera, a camera that prints the location of the area being photographed on the film when the photo is taken. In addition to photographing various sites, Discovery's crew also attempted to transmit several photographs to Mission Control. Flight controllers are continuing to analyze and troubleshoot a problem with the high data rate communications system aboard Discovery. In the meantime, all high data rate science information from the ATMOS instrument of the ATLAS- 2 array is being recorded on...