 We copy Roger, IFFD is telling me that they are complete with this FO, but they would appreciate if you did not power down and just leave this going until you come back in the afternoon, except for turning off the laser and the backlight because they're both run by battery. Your DCE activity for this afternoon at three hours, 52 minutes has been canceled. You need to go to your TPR. However, you will have some CM1 power-up procedures to do later on at approximately five hours. Does that mean I don't have anything to do near for an hour and a half? That's affirmative. You got walked out if you responded to that. It is affirmative that you have about an hour and a half of free time right now. About 15 minutes of that, but then I'd like to come back here and go ahead and start with some of the IFFD activities for this afternoon if that's okay. That's okay with us. Just sort of practice with it and stuff like that. I'll just give you a call when I come back in here, okay? Sounds great. I'll be Houston. Janice, we're... I'll be back in about five minutes. Listen to him. Do you just give us a little bit of a big picture here? I'll be Houston. Janice, just a heads-up of your Sarex contacts in about eight minutes. I'll be there. Chris, thanks for the heads-up. Yes, Janice, we were just conferring on the big picture. The DCE activities have been deleted for this shift. This is due to the limited amount of fuel they have available and their science team would like to rethink their test points to be performed and ensure that they get maximum science return through the end of the mission. So they have pulled out all of their activities in the timeline today. We are trying to reschedule some CM1 on you after your meal, which is different than what we told you in daily status. Okay, and thanks for that. We appreciate it. Well, good evening, Mark. We're right in the handover between the red shift who's just waking up and the blue shift who's getting ready to wind down. Janice just finished her exercise for the day. And Rod is still back in the lab doing some experiments, but hopefully he'll be up here shortly. And I guess we're approaching a halfway point in the mission, and it really feels to us on board like we're falling into a steady routine. But the minute you say the word routine, you have to step back and glance out the window. And when you do that and see the beautiful earths with and by, it reminds you that this is any but routine. It reminds me of where we are and why we're here. It makes us appreciate all the great work that the folks at Mission Control and the Marshall have done in pulling this mission together and supporting us through it. And it makes us realize that a space mission is any but routine in all aspects from the ground, making science we're doing to just what it takes to keep people flying safely in space. So today we're going to give you just kind of a rundown of a halfway through the mission type day in space. And it turns out it was Janice's half day off. So she got to do all kinds of neat things. And we'll show you what astronauts do on their days off, or at least what Janice did on her day off. And then I'm doing a little experiment in the back called the LIF shear cell. I'll show you that. This is me doing the LIF shear cell experiment. And a big picture on this is the materials processing experiment and measuring the diffusion coefficient of various atoms through different materials in space. What you see me there doing is rotating this shear cell. And what that does basically is they want this darn thing up and then atoms diffuse through the materials. And then at the end of the run we actually crank it, which breaks it into small pieces. And then on the ground they can measure how far the atoms diffuse. And from that really determine the diffusion properties or how far the atoms are able to migrate. And on Earth, because atoms weigh different amounts, you can't ever totally measure that property. Knowing that property will help us design better materials process, from everything from computers to materials. And here's Roger. And this is a view of an experiment we're doing on kind of the internal flow and fluid dynamics of droplets. And above the metal pedestal there you can see a small droplet of hydrogen and water levitate. We're doing materials with different viscosities or different consistencies because they have different properties. This is the shape of planets that are gaseous like Saturn and Jupiter. And the formation of stars, the Sun and other kinds of astrophysical bodies as well as any kind of fluids and droplets here on the ground. This is something else I like to do on my day off. I first got interested in flying in space from Reading Science Fiction. There we go, Winkle and Time is the name of that book. That's the first science fiction book I ever read by Madeline Lengel when I was in sixth grade and got interested in the space program. I still reading science fiction and I like to bring science fiction up with me and read it by Earth light, which is sunlight reflected off the Earth. It's hard to tell in this shot but it is bright enough to read with that light. It's just like reading in a room at home and having that connection and having red science fiction to get me started on this path and closing the loop by reading science fiction in space is really special to me. Well good morning Lieutenant Commander Susan Still and Commander Jim Housel. This is Peggy O'Leary with Channel 12 in Augusta. How are you this morning or evening in your case? Good morning Peggy and on Friday we celebrated the birth of a nation but also this weekend we celebrated the rebirth of the excitement of space exploration. Susan we are so proud that someone from Augusta can be a part of that. Tell us a little bit about your mission. On combustion and material science. The purpose is twofold but the main purpose is to somehow make life better on that sort of thing. I see that this is a very important mission when it came down early in April. Of course we were all disappointed but were you surprised at the quick turnaround for your crew, the payload in Columbia? I'll tell you Peggy, they sort of are ready to fly again so quickly. This is the first space shuttle and the crew we were just ready to go. We were well trained for STS-83 and so we just needed to maintain our proficiency leading into STS-94. What's the talk with your family at all since you've been in space? Nathan, have you the other day on the hand way to speak with my dad in a couple of days? Well you know Susan you don't have to wait a couple of days to speak to your father. He's here with us now live in the studios. Dr. Joseph still do you have any questions for your daughter Susan? I have any questions I'd just like to tell a hello from my mother and myself. I'm glad to see that she's doing well. One last and his name is Astro. What have you done today? What's your day been like so far? The bathrooms of women's work is never done even in space. This extended duration mission so that 16 days after launch and maybe 18 days after our last opportunity to practice at the shuttle training aircraft, we're not trying to lay up for the first time. Every day Susan fires us up and she and I make a run or two on the pilot simulator. You can see from the screen here that it's a floor desktop kind of simulator. It's actually pretty high stability. The control response is certainly not exactly the same as the shuttle or as the shuttle training aircraft. You can't really hang your hat on its flying qualities but it does get your brain working again as to what you ought to be looking at and when you need to be looking at certain parameters. Working on lining up the ball bar, working on the airspeed, working on the sight picture. Just the mechanics of landing the shuttle and I think this is a valuable tool. You'll see Susan's landing here just at or beyond the touchdown markers which is where we try to touch the shuttle down nowadays making some pilot runs together as a crew. And here I'm just going to show you just the path from the flight deck over to the lab. Here's the mid-dank. He goes through the airlock hatch. And you'll see there's a high speed 180 pass of Susan coming the other way. The tunnel there has a lot of laundry in it, both clean and dirty. And it's a good storage place for a number of different items. Here we bounce up into the lab and you can see the blue shift already at work there. Janet from the left and Roger at the far end. People told me that fresh food was really nice to have but that it ran out after a few days. So I knew that growing sprouts on the ground was pretty easy to do and I thought that growing them on orbit might be possible. The people in the food lab really helped out a lot. We got some alfalfa seeds into a food bag and devised a system for adding water to it without letting the sprouts out. And then all we needed was a way to get the water out without gravity. So by connecting bags together and creating a little bit of centrifugal force we could squeeze the water out of the bags. So sprouts are growing along and with a little bit of luck we'll be able to eat them soon enough. I end up here with a couple of earth odds shots. This is the border between the United States, between Texas and Mexico. That's Brownsville area right below us in Brownsville, Texas area. And the border with Mexico. Everybody has commented several times. It's probably the most beautiful island shot that we get anywhere around on orbit. These are the Bahamas. Florida south is to the top of the screen and Florida is off to the right. And just the beautifully that we get as we fly over the Bahamas we just never get tired of that.