May 6 1985
From The Space Library
Commander Robert Overmyer landed the Space Shuttle Challenger today on a lake-bed runway at Edwards Air Force Base, after it had caused two sonic booms that triggered burglar alarms and calls to police, the Washington Post reported.
Of the 15 experiments flown on Spacelab 3, 12 apparently operated successfully and two at least partially so. Among the successful experiments was photography of the Northern and Southern lights, which sent streaks of brilliant flashes at the extreme latitudes near the north and south polar regions at that time of year. Challenger's crew photographed 18 auroras. Another successful device was a laser spectrometer that for the first time measured from orbit the ozone layer that protected the earth from the sun's ultraviolet light.
Crew members were able to restore two experiments that had initially been inoperable. One was an experiment to study the dynamics of droplets of fluids in weightlessness, the other an instrument that counted and measured cosmic rays striking Challenger in orbit. They were unable to deploy the wide-field camera intended to study the ultraviolet light of hot stars.
The afternoon of the landing NASA personnel removed the monkeys and rats in their cages for a flight to Kennedy Space Center, where researchers would kill and dissect the rats to examine their vital organs under a microscope for changes caused by weightlessness.
Physician/astronaut William Thornton said they had brought back two monkeys that were even friendlier than they were before the flight-"Those primates are part of the crew right now," he commented. During the flight, one of the monkeys experienced motion sickness for several days, requiring Thornton to feed it by hand. On May 4 the Greensboro News & Record reported that Thornton said, "Our feeding crisis is over. I wouldn't have believed the effect of a caring human hand." However, on May 14 Overmyer told reporters at Johnson Space Center that, "NASA has a problem that NASA has to solve if we're going to fly those cages again," the W Post reported. "I never dreamed that all that stuff would come out of those cages and escape into our atmosphere" [see May 2]. He added that the experience with the animals "never took away the luster" of spaceflight, a sentiment echoed by pilot Frederick Gregory, an Air Force colonel who became the first black astronaut to take the Space Shuttle's controls. (W Post, May 5/85, A4, May 6/85, A3, May 7/85, Al, May 14/85, A3; Greensboro News & Record, May 4/85, A4)
NASA announced that space age technology was in use in the Republic of Gabon, Africa, where solar photovoltaic power systems installed in four rural villages would improve public health and education facilities and lighting and sanitary water supplies. NASA's Lewis Research Center (LeRC) managed the project, which was jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Ministry of Energy and Hydraulic Resources of the Republic of Gabon; the Gabon government selected the villages to participate in the program.
The project provided a photovoltaic power system, lights, air circulation fan, and a refrigerator/freezer for vaccine storage to each village dispensary and a power system, lights, and a color TV and video cassette recorder/player to each village school. The villages' sanitary water systems had a newly drilled well, a photovoltaic system, a submersible well pump, a water storage tank, and a water distribution system that piped water to village fountains. Public lighting systems included a power system and sodium vapor lamps mounted on poles. All systems were instrumented to collect data for performance analyses.
Total photovoltaic array capacity for all systems was 12.1 kw; output of the smallest array was 80 watts for street lights, the largest 3 kw for one water pump. Batteries for the solar arrays should last about 10 years before replacement; solar arrays had a life expectancy of at least 20 years.
According to Tony Ratajczak, project manager at LeRC, "The goal of DOE and the Republic of Gabon, for this project, is to investigate and evaluate the economic, social and technical value of photovoltaic power systems in aiding progress and improving the quality of life in Gabon." (NASA Release 85-68)
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