Probe Launched, Shuttle Set for Touchdown
Having successfully launched a solar probe to carry out the most ambitious exploration of the sun ever attempted, the space shuttle Discovery is set to land Wednesday at Edwards Air Force Base at a most appropriate time: sunrise.
Officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Dryden Flight Research Facility, located at Edwards, said the spaceplane is to land about 6:54 a.m., just as the sun rises at the sprawling Mojave Desert base.
The viewing site on the eastern shore of the dry lake bed there will be open to the public for the landing. The spaceplane is to cross the coastline near Santa Barbara, so the twin sonic booms that herald its arrival probably will not be heard over most of the Los Angeles Basin.
This was an unusually short mission of only four days, and the primary goal was achieved six hours after the Discovery blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center on Saturday. The Discovery sent the European-built Ulysses probe off toward Jupiter, where it will “hang a left,” as NASA Chief Scientist Lennard Fisk put it, and go into a huge orbit that will carry it over both poles of the sun.
Only the equatorial region of the sun is visible from the Earth, and scientists have long wanted to study such things as the sun’s magnetic field and the solar wind over the poles. Ulysses, cornerstone of a $750-million joint U.S.-European mission, will make that possible for the first time. It will reach the sun’s south pole in 1994 and the north pole a year later.
Meanwhile, the five-man Discovery crew carried out a series of relatively minor experiments Monday. Some of the experiments will be repeated today until late morning, when the crew will begin stowing its gear in preparation for landing.
During the short mission, the crewmen have shared Discovery with 16 rats. The rats are part of an experiment to learn more about how weightlessness affects physiological responses to drugs.
The mission was described by the flight director, Ron Dittemore, as unusually trouble-free.
“There have been no orbiter problems at all,” he said. “We’re just sitting here watching the data, and we’re pleased everything is working just fine.”
The Discovery is commanded by Richard Richards, 44, and piloted by Robert Cabana, 41. The other crewmen are William Shepherd, 41, Thomas Akers, 39, and Bruce Melnick, 40, the first Coast Guardsman to fly in space.
The success of the flight is good news to the troubled space agency. This is the first flight in more than five months because of a series of problems, including leaks from hydrogen fuel lines in the two other shuttles, Atlantis and Columbia.
Workers at the Kennedy Space Center are already preparing for the launch of Atlantis around Nov. 7 on a secret military mission, but that launch depends on whether the fuel leak problem has been solved. Even if that launch goes off as planned, no one is sure when Columbia will fly again.
