April 18, 1994 MET 09

Student Report Seven

This is it, folks. Endeavor lands tomorrow, and we're going home either tomorrow or Wednesday. What a long, strange trip it's been ...

Y'know, we've been writing these things for a week and a half now, and I wonder if anyone has been reading them. I'm going to post our E-Mail addresses at the end of this, so that if you get the urge -- to say hi, to ask further questions, or just to tell us that you read these things -- you can.

Yesterday was Aaron's air-ground link with Endeavor, and we'll let him speak up later. First, yesterday's report talked a lot about the outside of JSC, which is interesting, but kind of superfluous. The really incredible stuff is what's IN the buildings.

You already know about the Clean Rooms, Mission Control, and EOL. The only other place that we've got personal experience with is Building Eight. Half of building eight is the on-site medical facility. The other half, the half we've used has video and photo labs, and a computer set up to print photos from laser disk.

I've got to diverge from my divergence for a bit to tell you about the photos. An average shuttle mission comes home with three to five thousand frames of photographic film, from cameras high enough quality that they can take detailed Earth pictures from orbit. These pictures are all developed, numbered, cataloged according to latitude \ longitude, main visible features, etc. This information is stored in a database at JSC called sseop.jsc.nasa.gov, which is public access. NASA also publishes laser disks which contain several tens of thousands of shuttle photos apiece, which makes it slightly easier to find, let's say, the photos from STS-42, roll 97, frame 143.

That's the only other building that we know from personal experience. However, we've been told about a lot of incredible stuff, which hopefully we'll get to see once the shuttle has landed. There's a building which is set up to run simulations in Mission Control. It has the capabilities to feed data into Mission Control that exactly replicates a shuttle mission, and they can go through any number of "anomalies," to see how well the ground crew is prepared for them. Unless you have participated in a simulation, you're not allowed through Mission Control unescorted during a mission.

Astronaut training goes on here, and I assume they've also got the standard battery of equipment that you've seen in The Right Stuff. However, I'm told that they have a full array of VR equipment. The American government is just about the biggest user of VR in the world, for just such applications like this. The equipment they use today probably saves them thousands of dollars per astronaut in materials used for training.

A slight divergence, and then we'll go to Aaron. If anyone out there in Netland is interested in working on a shuttle mission, this is for you. STS 68, the second SRL mission, is flying in August. By then, we would like to have a network of people across the country (or even across the world, if possible) on-line to JSC during the mission. If any of these people knew of anything interesting going on in their area (flooding, fires, anything major that could be seen from space and might make a difference to the radar) they'd write in to us with a report of what they knew, where they were, any and all information that they thought pertinent. Our information here is limited by what gets put on the Net or in the newspapers. If it's something like a volcano eruption or an earthquake, we're not likely to get any information until it's over, and while aftermath is probably interesting, it doesn't give us any more information about the way the world works. So, if you're interested in helping out a shuttle mission, write to either Aaron or Jon.

And now, to wrap up the series, here's Aaron with what happened last night.

STOP THE PRESSES! Before Aaron says a word, we've forgotten to thank the six most important people in the entire mission!

Thank you, Shuttle Commander Sidney Gutierrez.

Thank you, Mission Specialist Michael Clifford.

Thank you, Pilot Kevin Chilton.

Thank you, Mission Specialist Thomas Jones.

Thank you, Payload Commander Linda Godwin.

Thank you, Mission Specialist Jay Apt.

These six are the astronauts who served aboard the Endeavour (we've been leaving out the u in Endeavour all week. Oops.) for STS-59, the Space Radar Laboratory. It was their incredible dedication and hard work that enabled this mission to go so spectacularly smoothly. And we almost forgot to thank them. Shame on us. Now back to our regularly scheduled report.

Here we go. To start out, I was talking to Linda Godwin, the Payload Commander. It was kind of neat because I also talked to her once before, last summer at JPL. No particular amenities were exchanged; the format of our conversations with the crew are a long comment, then several smaller comments with space for response. I told her about how I worked two years ago in the field on the upper peninsula of Michigan, on one of the sites that they have imaged. I told her about what an incredible experience it was, getting away from a science class to do something like that, or like working at JSC. The feeling is absolutely different. Learning on the job like this is incredible. What I'm doing matters, and that makes all the difference in the world. If something goes wrong in a high school physics class, nobody cares. Here, when someone asks you to find something out and they need it in an hour for the shuttle flyby, you don't get a chance to do it over. And you do NOT fail. If you did screw up, I don't really think that anyone would care; they plan for that, and it happens. But that's not what happens. You do it. You do the best job possible. And if it involves learning some radar science, or meteorology, or computer science, well, them's the breaks.

I love it.

Anyway, once I got done with that, I noted that I had been wondering how different the training had been for this mission as opposed to her others, and she was nice enough to oblige me by telling me. Pretty much the same thing happened when I wondered what differences she noticed in the state of the world between yesterday and a week before that. All in all, it was fun and informative, and I got a real kick out of talking to the shuttle.

OK, folks, here's where we get off. It's been fun -- we all learned a little, and nobody got hurt. I hope that you've enjoyed reading these things as much as we've enjoyed writing them. We encourage correspondence -- that's how you learn, and learning's how you grow.

Signing off,

Aaron Moshiashwili amosh@eden.rutgers.edu

Jon Woodring woodring@usc.edu

Alicyn Campbell acampbel@reed.edu