Microgravity Science Laboratory-1 Daily Science Update for
April 8, 1997Microgravity Science Laboratory-1 Daily Science Update for
April 8, 1997
Tuesday April 8, 8;30 a.m. CDT Huntsville ,AL
Scientists from the first Microgravity Sciences Laboratory mission (MSL-1),which lands this afternoon aboard Space Shuttle Columbia, aren't going home empty-handed.
"The science teams have been very, very busy," said mission scientist Mike Robinson said of replanned science activities aboard MSL-1. "They've squeezed as much as is humanly possible from a science standpoint in the last couple of days. None of these investigations is done - but they did get a very good start....
"We've tried to get everybody something. I think we were very successful in that. We obviously didn't finish anybody."
And the scientists may get a second shot at their experiments.
In a briefing Monday afternoon near the end of MSL-1's science activities, Joel Kearns, the manager of microgravity materials sciences and applications division at Marshall Space Flight Center, said that he had taken the unusual step of requesting a quick reflight of the mission. Planning for a reflight will require assessing the impact on future Shuttle missions and science plans, and the time scientists will need to recycle their experiments.
"I have no doubt that because of the great success shown in our limited opportunity to acquire research data in the past few days that in the future we will bring these investigations to a successful conclusion,"Kearns said. MSL-1's few days aloft showed "the excellence of our efforts."
MSL-1 Spacelab payload was the primary payload for Columbia's STS-83mission. The planned 16-day mission was cut short when one of Columbia's three fuel cells started faltering soon after launch, April 4. Columbia is scheduled to land Tuesday afternoon at Kennedy Space Center, Fla.
As a result, the science teams were asked to run their highest-priority experiments first before power was cut back aboard the shuttle. Eventually the astronauts were working in the dark as lights were turned out to conserve electricity for power-hungry furnaces and other equipment.
"All 13 facilities got some science," Robinson said. "The question is how much they got." He wanted to avoid giving a percentage to each experiment, saying it was like building a painting one brush stroke at a time. Each is important, and you can't say exactly how many are needed to have the complete picture.
Robinson noted that only 14 out of 142 planned combustion experiments were completed, "but that does not tell you the whole story."Two of the Laminar Soot Processes experiments "were very good quality experiments" which the principal investigators expect "will rewrite combustion textbooks."
These experiments were the first combustion experiments involving free-floating fireballs that did not touch the containers.
The TEMPUS electromagnetic levitation furnace achieved deep undercooling- holding a specimen liquid far below its "normal" melting point- on key specimens of zirconium and palladium-silicon. While undercooled and still liquid, important data on surface tension, viscosity, and specific heat were collected.
Equally important to the TEMPUS team was validation of their design which encountered some problems on its first flight in 1994.
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Author: David
Dooling
Curator: Linda Porter
NASA Official: Gregory S. Wilson