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VIRTUALISATION 25 years of satellite repair: Solar Max to Hubble
VIRTUALISATION 25 years of satellite repair: Solar Max to Hubble | 25 years of satellite repair: Solar Max to Hubble |
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| by William Atkins | |
| Tuesday, 07 April 2009 | |
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In was the year 1984 and NASA was preparing for its 11th space shuttle flight. It was the early days of the Space Transportation System (STS) program with brand new space shuttles. This reporter was in Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center during this flight, and now 25 years later I am reporting an equally exciting time in the history of NASA, and our exploration of space and our understanding of Earth. In this special mission twenty-five years ago, the space shuttle Challenger took off from the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, on April 6, 1984 (at 8:58 a.m. EDT, 13:58:00 UTC). U.S. astronaut Robert Crippen was the commander of the STS-41C mission and Dick Scobee was the Challenger pilot. Three mission specialist were onboard, too: George “Pinky” Nelson, James "Ox" van Hoften, and Terry Hart. The crew first deployed the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), a huge 21,300-pound, 12-sided cylinder that contained 57 experiments from an international array of scientists. With the large container successfully deplayed and left to orbit the Earth to expose all of its experiments to the near-vacuum of space, the astronauts went on to the second stage of their mission. They then jumped into a higher orbit on the third day of the mission. At about 300 nautical miles (556 kilometers) above the Earth, they approached Solar Max from below. The Solar Maximum Mission (Solar Max, or SMM) was a satellite designed to investigate activity from the Sun, especially solar flares. It had been launched on February 14, 1980, but its attitude control instruments and part of the electronics system on its coronagraph (an instrument to study the Sun’s corona) had gone bad. Page two continues. |
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