Jan 9 1990
From The Space Library
NASA launched the first of 10 expected Shuttle flights in 1990 (flight STS-32) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with a 10-day mission to orbit a Navy communications satellite and to retrieve another. The liftoff, originally scheduled for December 18, had been delayed three times because of problems with the renovated launch pad and once because of low clouds. The Navy satellite was deployed January 10.On January 12, the spacecraft closed in on and retrieved the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), an 11-ton satellite, into the cargo bay, using a 50-foot robotic arm.
The LDEF was sent up with Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1984 to provide vital information on the design of spacecraft and NASA's Space Station, as well as other experiments. The orbiting laboratory was scheduled to be recovered 10 months after its deployment, but the nearly five-year postponement caused by scheduling problems and the Challenger accident resulted in a decaying orbit that was expected to reach Earth's atmosphere by March of 1990. The 57 experiments aboard the 30-foot-long cylindrical satellite included an array of potential space building materials being tested for reactions to radiation, extreme temperature changes, and collisions with space matter. Also tested for prolonged space exposure were optical fibers, pure crystals for use in electronics, and a student experiment involving tomato seeds. Interstellar gases and cosmic radiation were also trapped in an attempt to find clues into the formation of the Milky Way and the evolution of heavier elements. For the remainder of the mission, astronauts carried out other scientific and engineering work.
Columbia landed on a concrete runway early in the morning on January 20 at Edwards Air Force Base in California after a landing postponed for a day because of fog. The flight set a precedent both because of duration-11 days-and because the aircraft was the heaviest Shuttle ever to land, a result of the captured cargo. The mission was without incident, save for a few minor problems involving a leaky dehumidifier, a smoke detector that went off unexplainably, a malfunction in one of the three Inertial Measurement Units (critical for reentry, but the Shuttle can land with only one functioning unit), and a small engine used by the automatic pilot for maintaining flight path that fired for no reason. The retrieved satellite remained in the Shuttle cargo bay and was scheduled to be flown to Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a modified NASA jumbo jet later in the week.
During re-entry, two NASA experiments measured the aerodynamic and thermodynamic characteristics of the orbiter. One of the experiments, a Shuttle Infrared Leeside Temperature Sensing experiment, involved an infrared camera used to collect imagery from the left wing, an area that reached 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, a higher than usual temperature, on the STS-28 flight. The second experiment involved the Shuttle Entry Air Data System, housed in Columbia's nose cap to gather "air data" to determine the orbiter's aerodynamic flight characteristics.(NY Times, Jan 10/90; Jan 11/90; Jan 13/90; Jan 21/90; W Post, Jan 10/90; Jan 11/90; Jan 13/90; Jan 21/90; C Trib, Jan 13/90; CSM, Jan 16/90; NASA Release 90-8)
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