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‘STS-93 POST FLIGHT PRESENTATION
JSC1794 – (1998) 15 1/2 Minutes –
Commander: Eileen M. Collins
Pilot: Jeffrey S. Ashby
Mission Specialists: Steven A. Hawley, Michael Tognini, Catherine G. Coleman
Dates: July 23-27, 1999
Vehicle: Columbia OV-102
Payloads: Chandra X-Ray Observatory, MSX, SIMPLEX, CCM, SAREX II, EarthKAM, PGIM, SWUIS, GOSAMR, STL-B, LFSAH, CGBA, MEMS, BRIC
Landing Site: Runway 33 at Kennedy Space Center, FL’
NASA film JSC-1794
Space Shuttle Missions playlist:
Public domain film slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
STS-93 marked the 95th launch of the Space Shuttle, the 26th launch of Columbia, and the 21st night launch of a Space Shuttle. Eileen Collins became the first female shuttle Commander on this flight. Its primary payload was the Chandra X-ray Observatory. It would also be the last mission of Columbia until March 2002. During the interim, Columbia would be out of service for upgrading, and would not fly again until STS-109. The launch was originally scheduled for 20 July but the launch was aborted at T-7 seconds. The successful launch of the flight occurred three days later.
Five seconds after liftoff, an electrical short disabled one primary and one secondary controller on two of the three main engines. In this event, the engines automatically switched to their backup controllers. The short was later discovered to have been caused by poorly routed wiring which had rubbed on an exposed screw head. This wiring issue led to a program-wide inspection of the wiring in all orbiters. Concurrently, an oxidizer post, which had been intentionally plugged, came loose inside one of the main engine’s main injector and impacted the engine nozzle inner surface rupturing a hydrogen cooling line allowing a small leak… This incident brought on a maintenance practice change which required damaged oxidizer posts to be removed and replaced as opposed to being intentionally plugged, as was the practice beforehand…
…Other payloads on STS-93 included the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX), the Shuttle Ionospheric Modification with Pulsed Local Exhaust (SIMPLEX), the Southwest Ultraviolet Imaging System (SWUIS), the Gelation of Sols: Applied Microgravity Research (GOSAMR) experiment, the Space Tissue Loss — B (STL-B) experiment, a Light Weight Flexible Solar Array Hinge (LFSAH), the Cell Culture Module (CCM), the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment — II (SAREX — II), EarthKAM, Plant Growth Investigations in Microgravity (PGIM), the Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus (CGBA), the Micro-Electrical Mechanical System (MEMS), and the Biological Research in Canisters (BRIC).
The Chandra X-ray Observatory is a space telescope launched on STS-93 by NASA on July 23, 1999. Chandra is sensitive to X-ray sources 100 times fainter than any previous X-ray telescope, enabled by the high angular resolution of its mirrors. Since the Earth’s atmosphere absorbs the vast majority of X-rays, they are not detectable from Earth-based telescopes; therefore space-based telescopes are required to make these observations. Chandra is an Earth satellite in a 64 hour orbit, and its mission is ongoing as of 2012.
Chandra Observatory is the third of NASA’s four Great Observatories. The first was Hubble Space Telescope; second the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, launched in 1991; and last is the Spitzer Space Telescope. Of those four, three continue; Compton ended in 2000. Chandra has been described as being as revolutionary to astronomy as Galileo’s first telescope.
It was named in honor of the Nobel-prize winning physicist S. Chandrasekhar who worked for University of Chicago from 1937 until he died in 1995. He was known for determining the maximum mass for white dwarfs. “Chandra” also means “moon” or “luminous” in Sanskrit. Before 1998, it was known as AXAF, the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility. AXAF was assembled and tested by TRW (now Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems) in Redondo Beach, California…
