Orbit of Discovery: The All-Ohio Space Shuttle Mission

Chapter Six: Scientific Discovery

206 Chapter Six Scientific Discovery Wewerescheduledtosleepuntil2:12a.m.CDTonFlight Day 3, but I woke up early because I was a bit cold. Everyone else was still asleep, so I really couldn’t do much but listen to music, read, or write down a few thoughts. I decided to make another entry in my journal: It’s 30 minutes before our official wake up and no one else is awake yet. The cabin is dark so can’t even look out the windows. I slept good last night—a good 6 hours with another 1½ hours of lying quietly awake. Woke up a little cold so I moved the ‘elephant’ trunk hose blowing the cold air out of the airlock. Nancy calls the airlock my little condo. I hope I can spend more time at the windows. Sometimes the flight deck is just too crowded. I’m looking forward to getting up and reading mail from Simone. I hope she and Kai are doing well and sound asleep right now. Two more days until we can talk. Looking forward to that! I saw 3–4 cosmic ray flashes last night before I fell asleep. Otherwise it was a quiet night. I only heard the WCS [toilet] 207 Scientific Discovery 2–3 times (instead of 10 times the 1st night). Yesterday I wore the Governor of Ohio’s watch all day and will pass it on to someone else today. This trip is so relaxed. Wake-up music has just come on! Time to get up. When our official wake-up time rolled around, most of the crew was already awake. To begin our third day in space, we were greeted with an old song, “Beautiful Ohio,” sung by icon Kate Smith. Since most of us were a bit unfamiliar with Smith’s repertoire, we all wondered who made the selection. After the song, our Capcom, Marc Garneau, told us Senator Glenn chose it to honor the mission’s Ohio astronauts. “Takes us all back home,” Tom remarked. It was a great way to start our third day in space. I decided to wear a rugby shirt that Simone selected. I intended to give it to her after the flight. With long sleeves and stripes of green, purple, and black, it was definitely her style and reminded me of her as I put it on. Tom and Kevin continued their work with the HERCULES camera but were having some trouble aligning its inertial measurement unit that was critical for pinpointing the exact locations on Earth being photographed. The alignment procedure required them to locate two different stars with the camera in different parts of the sky—very similar to the procedure we used to align the shuttle’s navigation units numerous times during the mission. To complete their task, they needed the flight deck cabin totally dark to better locate and identify the optimal pair of stars. As a result, they closed the shades over the two inter-deck hatches between the middeck and flight deck. That allowed the rest of the crew to continue working on the middeck without shutting off all the lights. Tom and Kevin would spend most of the time during the forty-fiveminute night passes performing camera alignments. That made it hard to get much time looking out the windows because with the inter-deck hatch covers closed, we couldn’t float up to the windows when we had a few moments of free time. Additionally, they needed 208 ORBIT OF DISCOVERY full access to the windows for the alignment process and taking pictures of their Earth targets. I felt a bit like I had been banished to the middeck dungeon and tried to grab any window time I could during their breaks for lunch, exercise, or other activities. I also tried to get in some window time early in the morning or at the end of the day when the windows generally were free. We had another spectacular daylight pass over the developing Tropical Storm Chantal. The maximum winds were reported to be fifty-one miles per hour with the storm moving in a west-northwest direction over the Atlantic Ocean at about five miles per hour. Observing such a large storm in daylight from directly overhead was dazzling. The bright unfiltered sunlight reflecting off the tops of the clouds was so intense that you either needed to squint or put on a pair...