Discovery Satellite Deployed Successfully : Space: With its main military assignment done, the crew set to work on a host of tasks, including 13 other Pentagon projects.

The shuttle Discovery put the manned orbiter fleet’s last major military payload in space Wednesday, opening the United States’ eighth and last manned space mission for 1992.

Because of Pentagon-imposed secrecy, there was no report on actual deployment of the secret satellite from the orbiter’s cargo bay, but an announcement from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Johnson Space Center said the operation had taken place on time and “exactly as planned.”

Published plans called for astronaut Guion S. Bluford, a 50-year-old Air Force colonel, to release the Defense Department payload 200 miles above the far western Pacific 6 hours and 9 minutes after the vehicle rose from its Florida launch pad. Completion of the operation was not announced for more than an hour, however.

When live broadcast of spacecraft communications resumed, Discovery’s five-man crew was at work deploying a communications antenna in preparation for the remainder of their seven-day mission.

Given its disclosed weight of 23,215 pounds and the northeasterly heading of the launch, analysts have speculated that the cargo listed as DOD-1 was a Lacrosse all-weather spy satellite, or perhaps a high-altitude sentry to monitor communications or rocket launches.

For security purposes, officials not only stopped the broadcast of communications with the astronauts while they worked with the secret payload, but eliminated the usual television pictures from the control room of Houston’s manned spacecraft center. During the remainder of the mission, there will be no pictures showing the spacecraft’s empty cargo bay, on grounds that conclusions about the satellite could be drawn from the structure that held it before deployment.

Their prime Pentagon assignment behind them, Discovery’s five astronauts turned to a host of scientific and engineering tasks, including work with 13 additional experiments for the Defense Department.

The flight had been scheduled to liftoff at sunrise, but officials delayed it for nearly an hour and a half because ice formed at several places on the vehicle’s 154-foot-tall fuel tank. Although the air temperature at the launch site got no lower than 48 degrees, high humidity and the chill from the super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen combined to create frost and patches of ice on the tank’s surface.

Because ice might flake off the tank and damage the orbiter’s delicate surface, National Aeronautics and Space Administration rules prohibit a launch if there is any accumulation of ice more than a sixteenth of an inch. The ice rule and other sharp cold weather limitations were imposed after the January, 1986, Challenger disaster when freezing temperatures were implicated in the shuttle’s destruction.

It was Discovery’s first flight since last January. In the interim the shuttle was extensively refurbished and modified. It went through the preparations for its 15th mission without a hitch, and according to Deputy Shuttle Program Manager Brewster Shaw, “arrived on orbit in great shape.”

To deploy the military satellite in the position required by the Pentagon, Wednesday’s launch put Discovery on a course that took it sharply northward. The angle, inclined 57 degrees from the Equator, means that before it lands back in Florida next Wednesday, the spacecraft swings below the tip of the South American continent and as far north as Scandinavia, crisscrossing the entire United States, except Alaska, in the process.

On Thursday, mission commander David Walker and pilot Robert D. Cabana will maneuver the spacecraft into a slightly lower orbit, and on Friday the astronauts will deploy half a dozen spheres, ranging from two to six inches in diameter, to be tracked by Earth-based telescopes and used to finely calibrate ground-based radars that seek out space debris orbiting the Earth.

Remnants of space vehicles, satellites and natural debris orbiting the Earth pose increasing potential risk to shuttles and to the space station, which the United States plans to begin erecting in about three years.

Other NASA experiments, anticipating space station operations, include investigation of problems associated with handling fluids in near-weightlessness. Additional assignments on behalf of Defense Department scientists include cloud photography, attempts to determine whether micro-gravity subtly affects vision and recording the effects of charged cosmic particles striking the spacecraft.

Members of the crew in addition to Walker, Cabana and Bluford are Army Lt. Cols. James S. Voss and Michael R. Clifford. Clifford is making his first flight, while Bluford, who became the first African-American to fly in space in 1983, is on his fourth shuttle trip as a mission specialist.