Astronauts Repair More Equipment : Restore Device to Monitor Cosmic Rays, Fix Movie Camera

Crew members aboard the space shuttle Challenger, switching roles from scientists and space explorers to amateur electricians and repairmen, continued to pull order out of chaos Friday and to salvage a mission that had been moving toward failure.

The latest tape-and-baling-wire repair came when Dr. Norman E. Thagard, a physician, and Lodewijk van den Berg, a chemical engineer, rewired and brought back to life a machine designed to monitor cosmic rays.

“There was great joy this morning, a lot of whooping and hollering and even a tear here and there,” said mission manager Joseph Cremin at the Johnson Space Center.

‘That’s Fantastic!’

One of those who celebrated was Dr. Jitendra Goswami, a co-investigator for the Indian experiment, who jumped to his feet and began shaking hands with colleagues when he received word that it had been fixed. “Oh boy, that’s fantastic!” he yelled.

Only 12 hours before, astronauts in the $1-billion, European-built Skylab--nestled in Challenger’s cargo bay--scored another amateur-repair success. Taylor Wang, a physicist, hot-wired and started a short-circuited machine that he had spent nine years designing. Friday morning, he began performing experiments with the machine, testing how weightless liquid drops can be suspended and manipulated by sound waves.

His $3.5-million Drop Dynamics Module is one of the most important devices on the weeklong mission. It will be used to determine whether exotic alloys and other materials can be manufactured in space, without containers that might contaminate the process. And scientists at the space center said the experiments could tell how liquids react in a zero-gravity environment, the subject of theories since Isaac Newton.

Plagued With Problems

When Challenger lifted off last Monday, it was immediately plagued with problems. Experiments did not work. Food and feces were escaping from the animal cages housing two squirrel monkeys and two dozen white laboratory rats.

But by Friday all but two of its 15 experiments were working and one of the monkeys, which had been lethargic and apparently space sick, was coaxed to eat and began moving about.

“The eating crisis is over,” said astronaut William E. Thornton, who hand-fed banana pellets to both monkeys to give them some touch with the humans working around them. “I would not have believed the effect of a caring human hand on an animal.”

The repair of the cosmic ray machine Friday caused Dr. George Fichtl, the mission scientist, to say that the astronauts had reached the “state of the art” in in-flight maintenance. But it would have not been possible had not another experiment, one that measured the makeup of the Earth’s outer atmosphere, failed the day before. The astronauts took wiring from that machine, hooked it to the cosmic ray device, reprogrammed the computer and flipped the switch.

Crew Almost Cocky

After that success, the astronauts grew almost cocky, calling themselves “the crew that launches with bad equipment and comes home with good equipment.”

Co-pilot Frederick D. Gregory, wearing an Air Force Academy T-shirt, boasted that he and Robert F. Overmyer, the shuttle commander, had fixed a movie camera in the cockpit, using cardboard and a piece of wire.

A mission control specialist told astronaut Don Lind, who waited 19 years for his first space ride, that he wanted to make an appointment to bring his car in for the astronaut to repair.

“Just remember, I don’t do windows,” said an obviously elated Lind.

The Challenger is now scheduled to land at 9:05 a.m. Monday at Edwards Air Force Base in California’s Mojave Desert. For the first time, the shuttle will fly directly over Los Angeles, approaching the coast near Long Beach and flying northeast over the city. NASA officials said two sonic booms should shake the area at 8:57 a.m., and that the shuttle will be flying at 90,000 feet as it approaches the coast.