Electrical Shorts, Room Full of Rat Food and Droppings : Astronauts Conduct Experiments, Face New Problems

Astronauts of the space shuttle Challenger faced troubles ranging from electrical shorts to a room full of floating rat food and droppings Tuesday as they carried out a series of intricate experiments and made a spectacular pass through the pulsating, flickering aurora of the South Pole.

The equipment failures aboard the European-built, $1-billion Spacelab put the astronauts behind schedule in their round-the-clock experiments, but NASA officials at the Johnson Space Center said the mission was still regarded as a success so far, with nine of the 11 attempted projects in progress.

“I’d grade our papers as good,” Spacelab mission manager Joseph Cremin said, adding that he would not have made such a statement earlier in the flight.

Nagging Problems

Despite those high marks, the astronauts faced a number of nagging problems that kept them working through much of the day as trouble-shooters rather than scientists. Early Tuesday afternoon, Dr. William E. Thornton, who is in charge of the two dozen rats and two monkeys on board, reported trouble with his menagerie.

He said that tiny, foul-smelling food, as well as some feces, escaped from the holding cages as he was feeding the animals and that the debris spread through the 23-foot-long Spacelab cabin.

“I’m not exaggerating,” Thornton told Houston’s Mission Control. “It is a literal flood of these things. It smells like powdered rat food. It is permeating the atmosphere of the Spacelab, although it settles out fairly rapidly.”

All the astronauts in the Spacelab were ordered to wear protective face masks after the accident with the animals, but flight director William Reeves in Houston said he did not believe that the problem was serious.

Food Bars Cited

“The main particulate matter we believe to be the food bars,” he said. “The filtration system appears to take it out of the module fairly quickly.”

The animals are being used to test the effects of weightlessness in space and how well their specially designed cages would work.

Other problems included a breakdown of a computer used to monitor activities in the Spacelab from the flight deck, an intermittent failure of the water supply and a malfunction in the shuttle-to-ground communications system that allowed the Space Center to listen in on in-cabin conversations.

“I hope I haven’t blown it this morning,” Flight Commander Robert F. Overmyer said, referring to some salty language that was accidentally monitored.

But the eavesdropping capability also provided a freshness to the flight, allowing those on Earth to hear the astronauts talking in awe of the view.

Project Shut Down

The two experiments not working and possibly abandoned deal with the use of a French-developed wide-angle astronomical camera and a urine monitoring investigation. A bent handle prevented opening an outer hatch for the camera. Water in the urine test experiment backed up on Monday and sprayed the inside of the shuttle, leading to a decision to shut down the project.

Failure also was reported in the first phase of a three-part project to produce crystals from a substance called triglycine sulfate, used in the detection of infrared materials. But National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials said they hoped that two other similar experiments would work.

Another setback came in one of the more important experiments on the shuttle, which deals with running a series of tests on drops of water and other substances, keeping them suspended and rotating in space with the use of sound waves.

Electrical Short

The experiment could yield important information in the field of manufacturing without containers, as well as the study of clouds, the workings of the atmosphere and nuclear physics. But the machine designed by astronaut Taylor Wang did not start when the switch was flipped because of an electrical short.

Early Tuesday evening, Wang was using electrical tape in an attempt to isolate the short.

“Whoever figures this out, I’ll buy them dinner,” a dejected Wang said after hours of attempts to start his machine.

One bright spot of the day was passing through the southern aurora, the bright, electrically charged field on both ends of the Earth’s poles. Don Lind, who is in charge of filming the aurora, marveled at what he saw as he shot footage of the bright lights.

“We’ve got a spectacular aurora,” said Lind, who waited 19 years for his first space flight. Lind had been scheduled to fly on what was to be the last Apollo mission to the moon, which was canceled for budgetary reasons.

The other astronauts on the crew are co-pilot Frederick D. Gregory, physician Norman E. Thagard and scientist Lodewijk van den Berg.