Oct 5 1984
From The Space Library
October 5-13: NASA launched on October 5 at 7:03 a.m. EDT from KSC the Space Shuttle Challenger on STS mission 41-G, the sixth flight of Challenger, with a crew consisting of Commander Robert L. Crippen; pilot Jon A. McBride; mission specialists Sally K. Ride, Kathryn D. Sullivan, and David C. Leestma; payload specialists Marc Garneau, a Canadian; and oceanographer Paul D. Scully-Power. It was the most crew members to fly on a Space Shuttle mission.
During the first day of flight, crew members deployed NASA's Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (EBBS); however, the two solar panels that supplied electricity to the 5,000-pound satellite refused to unfold. Ride corrected the ERGS problem by using the Space Shuttle's mechanical arm to place the satellite's solar panels in the sunlight to thaw the hinges. It took almost three hours to get the panels warm enough to respond to commands to unlock. The satellite was placed in orbit off the west coast of Mexico, instead of south of Bermuda.
While trying to determine the source of the ERGS problem, Kathryn Sullivan deployed the Shuttle Imaging Radar-B (SIR-B), a 35-by-7-foot radar camera, which had difficulty stabilizing when only one of it two "leaves" was erected. The radar antenna would send out thousands of pulses every second, and the large number of echoes the radar antenna received allowed it to draw a photograph-like image of the part of Earth that its beams struck.
During the flight, a storm of cosmic rays apparently caused by sunspots knocked out for about 13 hours NASA's TORS, which affected the imaging radar system. Among the parts of the world that the radar had planned to map but would probably lose were the entire Amazon River basin, the islands that made up Indonesia, and the seas off the Cape of Good Hope. The radar was also to track the progress of tropical storm Josephine, southeast of Florida in the Atlantic Ocean, which would force Challenger's landing from Cape Canaveral to Edwards Air Force Base.
An ice buildup on the exterior of the Space Shuttle's water vents forced the crew to alter slightly the use of the ship's water facilities. The buildup, caused by a slight malfunction of the backup cooling systems, posed only an inconvenience as the astronauts had to heat up the water vents to melt away the small accumulations of ice, raising the temperature inside the cabin to as high as 90°. Crippen corrected the craft's air-conditioning system, and the temperature inside Challenger neared its norm of about 75°.
On October 11, Sullivan became the first American woman to walk in space when for 3 1/2 hours she performed tasks requiring a kind of patience, dexterity, stamina, and strength originally believed in the space program to be unique to men. She stepped into space at 11:44 a.m. EDT along with Leestma. With each held by a single tether, they worked in daylight and darkness to rehearse a critical fuel transfer, stow a troublesome antenna, and photograph their efforts for ground engineers.
Challenger landed at 12:27 p.m. EDT at KSC in the second of four attempts to land there instead of at California's Edwards Air Base and the first in three missions that Crippen was not waved off a Florida landing by bad weather. Dr. Shelby Tilford, NASA director of space science, said that the mission was successful despite disappointments with the imaging radar. Tilford said that all other Challenger experiments worked perfectly. The space-borne mapping camera, carried on a Space Shuttle flight for the first time, took 2,300 frames of film in mapping parts of every continent. Challenger apparently returned to Earth in good condition, except for minor damage to the two rear engine parts suffered during ascent. (NASA MOR E-420-41-G-09 [prelaunch], Sept 28/84, [postlaunch], Oct 5/84; NASA Release 84-132; NASA Fact Sheet, Sept 84; NASA Press Kit, Oct 84; W Times, Oct 9/84, 2A, Oct 10/84, 5A, Oct 12/84, 3A; W Post, Oct 5/84, A-2, Oct 9/84, A-4, Oct 11/84, A-17, Oct 12/84, A-6, Oct 13/84, A-3, Oct 14/84, A-5; NY Times, Oct 11/84, A-18)
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