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From: starrfie@hydro.la.asu.edu (Sumner Starrfield) Subject: MCC Status Report 17 : Three cheers for the astronauts and NASA! Date: Fri, 10 Dec 93 10:16:35 MST Mission Control Center STS-61 Status Report #17 Friday, December 10, 1993, 8:30 a.m. CST The STS-61 crew bid farewell to the Hubble Space Telescope with a successful, but slightly delayed, deploy early this morning. The following is a summary of the day's events, and all times given are in Central Standard Time. At 4:27 a.m., Claude Nicollier sent commands to open the berthing latches on the end effector of Endeavour's robot arm to release HST in free flight for the first time since it was captured for repair last Saturday. Following the release, Commander Dick Covey and Pilot Ken Bowersox performed two small separation burn maneuvers to gently move Endeavour away from HST at a rate of about 1-foot-per-second. Almost immediately upon release, the HST solar arrays acquired the sun and HST communicated directly through the TDRS communication satellite. The telescope's aperture door fully opened about 45 minutes prior to the deploy. The release came nearly three-and-one-half hours later than originally planned due to erratic data telemetry from an HST subsystems monitor. Overnight, one of four Data Interface Units that monitors Hubble engineering telemetry and commands some telescope functions experienced dropouts and conflicting readings. Each DIU has two-sided redundancy, and telescope controllers at the Space Telescope Operations Control Center found data errors occurring only in Side A of DIU-2, but no problems with the command capability. Controllers switched the DIU to its Side B function with full command and telemetry capabilities. The problematic Side A will be used as a backup system with only a slight degradation in its capability. Hubble has experienced this type of telemetry problem before and it is not related to any STS-61 servicing work or equipment. President Clinton and Vice President Gore congratulated the STS-61 crew on a successful servicing mission in a 15-minute phone call from the Oval Office at about 7:35 a.m. The president told the astronauts that this was "one of the most spectacular space missions in all of our history. We are all so proud of you...I want to thank each and every one of you for what you did. You made it look easy." President Clinton called the HST servicing mission "an immense boost to the space program in general and to America's continuing venture in space." The crew begins an eight-hour sleep period just before 10 a.m. The space "fix-it" team will sleep in and have a much deserved day off. Landing is still scheduled for Monday at 1:08 a.m. at KSC, weather permitting. Endeavour has enough consumables on-board to stay in orbit for at least one-and-a-half days longer than planned, if necessary. All Endeavour systems continue to perform excellently as the orbiter circles every 96 minutes approximately 320 nautical miles above Earth.
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