Documents / Document

STS-75 press kit

NASA · 40 pages · text from the file's own layer

This is NASA's press kit for Space Shuttle mission STS-75, dated February 1996 and later edited by Richard W. Orloff. It covers Columbia's planned 13-day flight carrying the Italian Tethered Satellite System reflight (TSS-1R) and the third United States Microgravity Payload. The kit sets out launch and landing plans, abort modes, the timeline, payload weights, crew duties, the tether's science objectives and investigators, and crew biographies. It does not mention any unidentified objects.

  • p. 5 …The STS-75 mission will be the 19th mission for Columbia and the 75th for the…
  • p. 6 …A voice update of the television schedule is provided daily at noon Eastern time. Status Reports…
  • p. 14 …During this time, Columbia's position will be adjusted periodically to give USMP experiments the best…
  • p. 17 …Marshall will furnish real- time engineering support for the TSS-1R system components and tether dynamics…
  • p. 19 …sent in real-time to the instruments aboard the Shuttle. During the mission, teams of scientists…
  • p. 21 …The closing rate at the time the satellite is docked to the cradle at the end…
  • p. 22 …The effects of gravity on the orbiting spacecraft are roughly a million times less than experienced…
  • p. 23 …At controlled temperatures extremely near the critical temperature, the fluid will be a billion times more…
  • p. 24 …The images of dendrites growing in space will be viewed in near-real-time by scientists…
  • p. 25 …The facility provides power, air and particle filtration, light, data collection, real-time monitoring, and sensors…
  • p. 36 …concurrently participating part-time in research activities of the Geneva Observatory. At the end of 1976…
  • p. 38 …of the launch countdown. He has logged over 1,800 hours of flight time, including 1…
Edited by Richard W. Orloff, 01/2001/Page 21
Retrieval Operations
Retrieval operations of the satellite will occur more slowly than deployment. The rate of retrieval of the
tether, the closing rate between Columbia and the satellite, will build after five hours since its initial
movement to a peak rate of about three miles per hour. At that point, when the satellite is about four and a
half miles from Columbia, the rate of retrieval will gradually decrease, coming to a halt about five and a
half hours after the start of retrieval operations when the satellite is approximately 1.5 miles from
Columbia. The satellite will remain at 1.5 miles from Columbia for seven to nine hours of science
operations before the final retrieval begins.
The final phase of retrieval is expected to take about two hours. A peak closing rate of closing between
Columbia and the satellite of about 1.5 miles per hour will be attained just after the final retrieval begins,
and the closing rate will gradually decrease through the remainder of the operation. The closing rate at the
time the satellite is docked to the cradle at the end of the deployer boom is planned to be less than one-
tenth of one mile per hour.

About this file

Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 40 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.