Dec 8 1983
From The Space Library
The Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-9) landed at 3:47 p.m. PST at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., after 10 days in space and 167 orbits-the longest Space Shuttle mission ever. The landing followed a delay necessitating 22 more orbits than planned when Columbia's computers failed 3 hours and 49 minutes prior to the planned reentry burn. Six hours after the two computers went off line, Columbia also lost one of its three inertial measurement units that provided orbiter orientation information. The orbiter carried five IBM general purpose computers and three inertial measurement units. Today's reentry was flown with one of each inoperative. A reentry could be flown with only a single computer and single measurement unit. Mission pilots John W. Young and Brewster H. Shaw, Jr., said at the time that they believed that the triggering of an upward firing 870-pound nose reaction control jet, which caused an unusually strong impact to the orbiter, was the likely cause of the computer failures. However, telemetry analysis showed that the thruster activity was coincidental to the computer malfunction. Instead, NASA came to the conclusion that it was a transient hardware internal problem. About 40 minutes after the problems occurred, the crew restored the second computer to operation.
On December 5, President Reagan and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in Athens at the time, held a conference call with the five U.S. crew members and one German payload specialist on Columbia. The U.S.
Information Agency (USIA) used five satellites and thousands of miles of land lines around the world to bounce the signals among Athens. Washington, and JSC to provide live television coverage of the call to seven European cities and the Cable News Network (CNN).
Aside from the computer problems, the ninth Space Shuttle mission was almost flawless and was distinguished by some significant scientific discoveries. One discovery involved the workings of the inner ear, disproving a 77-year-old hypothesis that had won the 1914 Nobel Prize in medicine for Swedish professor, Robert Barany. Barany had said that nystagmus, a flickering of a person's eyes when cold air is blown into one of his ears and hot air into the other, was caused by convection, the motion of fluids under uneven heating. But in space, the lack of gravity meant that convection did not occur. Nevertheless, the astronauts aboard Columbia showed the characteristic eye movements.
The six-man crew completed work on all but one of the 70 scheduled experiments; only a microwave sensing device misfired. Scientists from 14 countries designed the experiments, and the experiments did not end with touchdown. The four scientists were in quarantine, where they would be required to remain motionless so that scientists could observe how their bodies acclimated to gravity. (ESA Release, Dec 9/83; WH annon, Dec 5/83; W Tines, Dec 6/83, 3A; W Post, Dec 6/83, A-3, Dec 8/83, A-3, Dec 9/83, A-1; NY Times, Dec 9/83, A-1; P Ina, Dec/83, A-l; Av Wk, Dec 12/83, 23)
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