Glitches Delay Shuttle Satellite Release : Space: Trouble with radio interference and glare from the sun thwart deployment of the experimental device. The crew will try again today.

NASA scrapped plans to release an experimental science satellite from the shuttle Discovery on Saturday after struggling for hours to overcome problems caused by radio interference and glare from the sun.

After advising commander Charles Bolden Jr. to get a pencil to write down instructions--”you may also need some aspirin”--Mission Control informed him that flight directors were giving up for the day.

Officials said that they would try again today to release the satellite.

“I think that’s an excellent plan,” Bolden said.

The satellite, a 12-foot stainless steel disk called the Wake Shield Facility, was supposed to fly free of the shuttle for two days. Researchers wanted to see if superior semiconductor films would grow in its ultra-pure wake.

Flight director Gary Coen said other experiments planned for the mission would be curtailed or eliminated because of the delay in releasing the satellite but that the craft, once deployed, would remain out for two days as planned.

Discovery does not have enough fuel to extend its flight, officials said. The eight-day mission is due to end Friday.

The trouble began soon after astronaut Jan Davis used the shuttle’s robot arm to lift the Wake Shield from Discovery’s cargo bay.

As the Wake Shield dangled overboard on the end of the arm, allowing the rush of atomic oxygen to clean the extremely contamination-sensitive craft, the five status lights on the satellite appeared to keep going off. The lights are supposed to indicate the status of electricity and computer systems.

No sooner had Mission Control traced that problem to a bad battery and switched to a backup than the satellite’s two transmitters appeared to go out.

As the problems mounted, NASA passed on the second release opportunity and then again on the third and final opportunity of the day.

A Wake Shield manager, Alex Ignatiev, said the lights and battery apparently were never a problem. Glare from the sun made it hard to distinguish whether the lights were on or off, he said.

As for the transmission trouble, on-board radio interference was the likely culprit, Ignatiev said. The crew should be able to eliminate it by simply readjusting the position of the satellite on the end of the arm, he said.

If the satellite is not released, Discovery’s cosmonaut, Sergei Krikalev, will lose his big chance to pluck the satellite from orbit. Krikalev, the first Russian to fly on a U.S. shuttle, has spent much of the past year practicing with the robot arm to accomplish that task.

The $13.5-million satellite, built and managed by the University of Houston and Space Industries Inc. of Houston, is flying in space for the first time. Before the mission, researchers involved in the project cautioned that something might go wrong because such an experiment has never been tried.

One of the investigators is Discovery astronaut Ronald Sega, a physicist and engineer who also is flying in space for the first time.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans to fly the Wake Shield on four missions.