 We'd like the crew of 85 would also like to echo Mr. Abbey's thanks to all the folks who made our mission possible and easy and a lot of fun for us. So again, our hats off to y'all for all the hard work you put into the mission. And a little bit of thank you for all the work y'all have done. We have a movie here that we put together with all our post-flight video that we had and some slides. So we'll go ahead and dim the lights. We'll go ahead and start the movie. And we'll try to narrate it for you, give you some idea of what it was like to go on 85. It was August 7th, 1997. The vehicles already go out on the pad. It's a busy morning launch morning, so we all had a little bite to eat, got into the suit room, got all suited up. It takes quite a while to do that if you've seen a previous flight. But everyone was in great spirits. Everyone was excited to go. Got beam away from the breakfast table. And Steve's all excited. And last but not least, Bjarne got his suit all checked out, and he was ready to go also. The vehicle was out on the pad. It was fully loaded with propellant and fuel, and it was a flawless countdown. It was all ready to go. We departed the operational checkout building, the crew quarters where we stay for our trip, hopefully our only trip out to the pad for this flight. And due to the great weather and the countdown, it happened their first try. Once in the white womb, we get a little bit more equipment on our harnesses for our parachutes and oxygen bottles. And now we're going to show you inside the cockpit, climbing, kind of doing a chin-up here to get into the seats. A little bit different view than you normally see. Joe Tanner was our astronaut support person to strap us in. Trying to get comfortable, and on the mid-deck, while that was happening, Steve was getting in the MS3 seat. Kent's getting his helmet on. Jan's doing what she always does. Now actually, Jan, if you see on the left down there, is in the cockpit already. And the last but not least was Beamer, or Bob Kerr Beam, to get in the MS2 seat, our flight engineer for Ascent. The mid-decks ready to go, with Steve and Bjarnie all strapped in. With everyone aboard, it's time to remove the white room that rotated back, as you can see. At two minutes, they give us a call to close our advisers. We're going to turn our suit on in preparation for start. Six and a half seconds, there goes the main engines. Which is always a really beautiful feeling inside the vehicle. You can see the tank kind of does a little twang. And at T-Zero, we're on our way. And now we're going to show you what that looked like from inside the cockpit. The same exact sequence. There's the engine start, a lot of rumbling, a lot of vibration. You'll see the big jolt here for liftoff. And we're on our way. And if you watch the lighting condition, as we cleared the tower, we did a big roll maneuver to align ourselves for our Ascent. And you can see the lighting conditions change. And the sun winds up right in Jan's face for pretty much the whole Ascent. Well, as you know, it doesn't take long to get out of dodge here when those engines get going and start pushing and all that thrust gets going. So we were feeling acceleration about this time. We're a high inclination flight going up the eastern seaboard, 57 degree inclination going up to about 160 nautical miles. The launch was in kind of a hazy conditions, but we could see SRB set. So two minutes after launch, we got rid of the SRBs. And now we're going to show you what that looks like inside the cockpit, the big flash so you'll have an idea of what we see at SRB set. So it definitely gets your attention. You know the boosters are now separated. We can put our visors up at that time and ride the three shuttle main engines to the orbital speed and orbital altitude for the rest of the Ascent. After we get off the tank, the tank re-enters the atmosphere. That gives you some idea of our speed. This is real time. This is not sped up. Some idea of our speed at the low altitude we're at. Once we're on orbit, it's now time to turn the rocket into an orbital space station. So we open the big payload bay doors and get ready for payload ops. Once we have the payload bay door open, we can start our payload operations. This is a very busy flight with over 40 different payloads, some of which are you see here in the payload bay. In the middle of the payload bay is the Krista Spas, one of our primary payloads, which was a scientific satellite looking at chemicals in the ozone layer. On the very first day, we had to deploy a Krista Spas to give it as much time as we could on orbit. And here, Steve and I are in the aft flight deck getting ready for those robotic operations with the shuttle remote manipulator system, the Canadian robot arm on the shuttle. And here I am maneuvering the Canadian RMS to the Krista Spas grapple fixture so that we can grapple the Krista Spas as you see here and lift it up out of the payload bay and take it over the payload bay and get it ready for deploy. And here it is just before we release it. We're activating all of the experiments and instrumentation on the Krista Spas satellite, which was controlled by the Germans from Kennedy Space Center, a payload operations center. Here's a release of the RMS from the grapple fixture that's on the Krista Spas, and we send it on its way to a nine-day scientific mission and we retrieve the Krista Spas on the 10th day of the mission. To separate away from the Krista Spas, we maneuvered, actually, we almost maneuvered the orbiter with some separation burns to get us away from the Krista Spas, and you can see the Krista Spas as it is separated from the orbiter by moving the orbiter away from it. They were able to get a lot of data in those nine days. As you can see here, it's now fully separated from the orbiter. Although Krista was our main payload, our payload bay was very full. As you can see here, forward in the orbiter is to your left, and the first payload you see there is the Japanese robotic arm or the MFD, the manipulator flight demonstration. Then the next bridge you see there is the technology applications and science experiment, which had a bunch of engineering models to be tested in 0G and also scientific experiments. In the aft, and we'll get a close-up of that soon, you'll see another hitchhiker bridge, and that was the International Extreme UV Hitchhiker, and it had a multitude of payloads looking in the ultraviolet at stars, the Earth's atmosphere, any interaction of the shuttle with the upper atmosphere. A lot of these facilities had optical systems, and so we had a lot of hitchhiker doors, as these are called, which closed to protect them from debris during some of the more sensitive times of flight. We also had some mid-deck experiments, and this is me taking a media sample out of the bioreactor demonstration system. What I was doing, I was growing colon cancer cells to much larger aggregates than we could do in 1G environment, both for colon cancer research and cell research, and there you see the aggregates, and they grew to about three or four times larger than you would see in 1G. I continue on with some of the mid-deck experiments. This is Kent Romageur, or Rommel, as we call him, getting ready to do a saltless surface combustion experiment, and this is an experiment that has flown on a number of shuttle missions and builds up the knowledge of how materials burn in the 0G environment of space. In this case, we're burning a plexiglass, a type of plexiglass, and there you see the ignition of that plexiglass, and we filmed the burn for about 10 minutes before the flame, this little blue flame finally extinguished. This is the Swiss telescope. We used to have a look at the hail bob comet through the side-hash window, and it used the comet in the ultraviolet, which gives us a better signature of some of the ions and elements coming off the comet that give off light in the UV. Steve spent a fair bit of his time during the mission doing this experiment, and that little bright spot there just to the left of center is the actual comet. You can't see it very well. This is a long distance from the Earth, but by summing up a lot of these images, the scientists can pull out some of the structure in the comet itself. This is Jan and myself just preparing the microgravity vibration isolation mount for one of the experiments we're doing on it. This system isolates experiments, fluid dynamics, and material science experiments from the vibrations of the shuttle, and we'll see in the next shot that not only can we isolate, but we can actually shake an experiment with very well-controlled acceleration profiles to look at the sensitivity of experiments, typically the kind that we're going to be doing a space station to the vibrations. And here's a little student experiment we used MIM to do where we can visualize a motion of rather large-looking molecules that would behave the same as molecules in the air around us here today. The robot arm on the space shuttle on this flight is the Japanese manipulator flight demonstration. It's a small robotic arm about five feet long. As you see here in the payload bay, we're taking Stephen R. with the operators of this. We're taking it from the stowed position to the operational position where we can maneuver it around. This is the real-time speed of it. It's a very precise instrument, so it's therefore very slow, but it's very functional. We can use it on the space station to take experiments off of a pallet, put them inside of a scientific airlock, or to do very fine tasks that we'll need to do on the space station. One of the things that we did on our flight to demonstrate this capability was we took this arm, which has a grapple fixture at the end of it, attached it to the box. You see there we call it orbital replacement unit. We attach it to the box and unscrew some of the bolts that are attaching that box to its plate. And we're actually moving this around to test the performance of the arm and test its capability with a load on the end of the arm. So we moved this orbital replacement unit around, and that's a similar type of activity we'll be doing with this arm, which is on the end of a very long arm on the space station. So we just tested the small fine arm portion of what will fly on the space station. Another thing we did with this arm was we attached the arm to this door and actually unlocked the door, and we used the arm to open up the door. We did this with a program mode. We also did a lot of operations with some control from the ground, not just with the crew on the flight deck operating the arm. So this demonstrated a lot of capability for the future, and it performed very well. This has sped up a little bit this function in the last scene you saw. We celebrated the success of this arm by eating some Japanese curry rice. You notice the chopsticks and rice and curry, which was just delicious. We also had a little free time later in the flight when we got an extra day, and one of the things our folks did was some fluid experiments. Fluids tend to form a ball because of the surface tension. They form a sphere, and here we're trying to join the red sphere and the water together, and we were successful after a few tries. Another typical mid-deck activity is exercise. When you're in space, your cardiovascular system doesn't have to work as hard, so we have to exercise to make sure it works fine. We stayed busy on the flight deck as well throughout the flight. Along with a lot of the payloads came pointing constraints, pointing at various planets, stars, the sun, and back at the Earth. Kurt and I both stayed busy putting in digital autopilot inputs to point the different payloads at that. Also on the flight deck, you're usually busy with Earth ops, and just to give you an idea, we bring back more than 3,000 photos of the Earth, and here's some of the Earth going by over 17,000 miles an hour. The Earth observation scientists as well as oceanographers, meteorologists particularly are interested in this view. This is Super Typhoon Winnie, and we were fortunate enough to pass right over the eye of it. It's a very distinct eye. You could see the blue water through the eye. And also, Super Typhoon is hundreds of miles across. This is probably three to 400 miles across that you're looking at. And the way we get these photos, that was video that you saw, but the stills that we're going to show you later are from several different sources. We use a Hasselblad camera. It's a 70 millimeter format, and that does the majority of our Earth ops work, and we had just seen Beamer with one of those cameras. We also, though, carried a Linhoff camera, which just brings back gorgeous photos, and that's because the negative on that is a 4 inch by 5 inch shot. And a lot of times, we're busy doing other payloads such as this. Somebody floats up to the window and says, hey, look at this target going by. What is this? And so we kind of scramble for the cameras. In this case, it happened to be the Aurora. The video here is black and white. It doesn't really do it justice. And we've got slides later on to show you, but it was a gorgeous green color. It's down south of Australia, the southern lights. I'd like to transition now into the rendezvous day. Here we are on rendezvous morning, getting ready on flight day 10 to go pick up Christos Paz. And it really is a team effort. It takes everybody and the crew was involved, from Curt doing the manual flying, me doing some flying up front, Steve running a handheld laser. Here we are approaching on Christos Paz. And hours before we get this close to it, we're doing a set of burns to go ahead and phase ourselves in and close in on Christos. From the time we're within about 1,000 feet, it's manual flying. And Curt at the AF station has it positioned here at the arm. If we were only going to grapple Christos, we would have done it at that point. But along in our flight, we had a detailed test objective, which was to go ahead and simulate a docking on a future space station mission coming up. Where a Curt flew Christos right into the payload bay at a very precise rate. And now once it was just broke the mold line of the payload bay, backed back out. And to me it's always amazing that here you've got a 7,000 pound satellite and we have probably a 250,000 pound at this point orbiter. And we can control that orbiter to 0.1 foot per second plus or minus 0.03 and very precisely fly it into the grapple. Well as you can see Curt did a great job flying the orbiter right up around Christos and he offered just a berth for us without using the arm at all. And we politely declined that offer. And so Jan took control of the arm. And this is Jan flying into grapple the Christos-Spos satellite. And it's a very gentle maneuver and here it is ready to get put back into the payload bay. Your eyeballs are essential tools up there in orbit, especially when you're doing robotics operations like we did a lot of in flight. Here's Jan looking out the overhead window. And this is kind of an unusual view where we've got a camera up on the arm looking back down at our crew compartment, this teeny little spot up there in the heavens. And I don't know if you can see Jan looking out the window there, but it's a really important part of doing accurate robotics operations. In the future however we're going to have to learn to rely on other sensors other than eyes. We won't always be able to see out of the space station to see our arms. You see targets on the arm here and also targets on our payloads, Christos-Spos here. These are for a Canadian developed synthetic vision system that gives you a computer representation of where the payload is in relative to the payload bay. We brought the Christos-Spos right down over the crew cabin on the arm in order to test this system that use these spots as tracking targets. You can see them here on the telescope of the Christos-Spos just about five feet over our head. Very dramatic view. We let the sun go down and we kept lights on it and you can see it even in the dark we were able to track the targets. Speaking of the sun going down as a first time flyer, I found that to be one of the really spectacular sites in orbit and it comes out even well on video. Well unfortunately after 11 days, 20 hours and 27 minutes it's time to put the orbiter back on the ground, bring it back home. Both the crew and the vehicle back home to the Kennedy Space Center. We started our entry well on the other side of the earth around the south of India, Australia timeframe or position. We slowed the orbiter down from just over 17,000 miles an hour. As you see here we had an early morning landing and the glow of the early morning sun through the atmosphere was quite impressive. Approaching overhead we started a big right hand turn about 280 degrees to align the orbiter up on final for landing at Kennedy Space Center runway 33. We actually did a new kind of technique on the landing. We used short field speed break which is a technique to help control our energy in case we have tailwinds and we were the first landing ever to use that and it worked exactly as planned. The orbiter was my first chance to fly the orbiter. It flew very nicely just like some of the training that we get here at Kennedy or at JSC and at White Sands and Kennedy Space Center. Rolling out on final approaching the 300 foot point we can't put the gear down. We crossed the threshold around 230 knots looking for a touchdown around 195 knots. Right now Kent's telling me all the right things to do trying to make sure I got it right the first time. We touched down about 3,000 foot down the runway drags you came out right away and just a little bit of different view here as we look down the runway. Again the drag shoots out and the speed breaks and the vertical sail chart opening up to slow us down. As the drag shoot comes out it disc-reste opens up fully to cushion the nose touchdown. And now we roll safely down the runway at Kennedy Space Center after going something over 4.7 million miles. If we can bring the lights up just a moment I actually left out something I wanted to do earlier with the crew and explain a little bit about what each one did on the flight. First of all to my right was Kent Rominger. Kent will be referred to as Rommel since that's a whole lot easier to say. This was Kent's third flight. He flew on STS-73 and STS-80. It caused Del Norte, Colorado, his home and Kent was invaluable helping me stay out of trouble on the mission backing me up as the pilot and the rendezvous. He was my right hand man making sure all the rendezvous things went correctly. This was Dr. Jan Davis, JD or whatever. This is my chance to fly my second mission with Jan. We flew on STS-47 back in 92 and Jan also flew on STS-60. It was her third flight. Jan's a sweetheart. She comes from Huntsville, Alabama and I sure hope I get to fly with Jan again. She did a great job. She was my payload commander and also she was the head person on the MFD, the little robot arm payload. To her right is Bob Kerbeam. Don't get between Bob and any food or you're in trouble. But you'll hear us call Bob Beam or Beamer and that was a name that came with him from the Navy. Bob was our flight engineer during ascent and entry and he's also the BDS, the bioreactor person on the mid-deck but also he kept us, Rommel and I that is coordinated on the rendezvous. He was the guy who ran all the computers and kept all the data coming in to make sure our rendezvous went correctly. To his right we have Dr. Steve Robinson. By the way, Beam comes from Baltimore, Maryland. He called that home our wood lawn. Is that correct? I was practicing that. To Bob's right is Steve Robinson. Steve comes from Sacramento, California and we have a lot of names for Steve. Steve was our primary person on the Swiss payload which was the telescope to look at the hell Bob Comet so he became head cheese so to speak. It was much funnier when we made it up on orbit. Steve did a great job. It was his first flight as was Beamer's first flight and they did an outstanding job as rookies. And last but not least is Bjornie Trigvison. Bjornie is a Canadian astronaut. He's been in this program longer than we have to get to go fly and I admire him for that, his determination and effort. But Bjornie was obviously his first flight as a payload specialist with us. He was the principal investigator on the MIM payload which is a microgravity isolation amount payload and unfortunately Bjornie spent most of his time on the mid-deck working the MIM payload and Harley got to look out the window as much. But Bjornie did a great job and it was my pleasure to fly with all these folks and I sure wish we could go do it again. We had such a great time. Some slides we show you to help explain our mission a little bit better than the film because the film is pretty fast paced and it's kind of tough to get all our words out. So we'll go ahead and go through those slides if we could bring the lights back down and bring the slides up. Okay, they give me the easy slides because again I'm the commander and it's tough for me to do these things. But obviously you see in our crew patch we designed that as a crew member or as a crew and you see in the payload bay a representation of some of our payloads and our mission was primarily a mission to planet Earth to study the Earth's atmosphere and how we as humans have affected that Earth and that's represented on the patch. A picture of the crew. Again I can't say enough good things about those folks. They did a great job and between you and them it kept me out of trouble and we had a very very successful mission on 85. And again they gave me the easy photo here. No presentation would be complete without a launch photo. The 23rd mission of Discovery and she performed flawlessly. We had no malfunctions no anomalies on flight that impacted any of our operations. So we had nothing to worry about with the orbiter and it was the 86th mission in the space shuttle program. So we should be all proud with the things we've accomplished in those missions. As I said in the film we deployed the Krista Spas on flight day one. The Spas is actually the carrier for the instruments four times before three times before this was the fourth flight and it flew once before with the Krista instrument which is the main instrument you see there on the top is a cryostat actually because it has infrared detectors that looked at about 15 different gases in our middle atmosphere and again looking at the dynamics and the formation of ozone in our atmosphere and that was a German instrument as was the Spas carrier next to it was a large instrument called Marci which was an American experiment which looked at two specific chemicals in our atmosphere OH ion and also NO which are very instrumental in determining some of the equations and dynamics of what's going on in our atmosphere and they received lots of data from pole to pole at different altitudes in the world. Below that you can see probably down in the lower right corner a snow cap mountain that's Mount Adam and we're actually near the Oregon Washington border in the United States. Steve and I control the remote manipulator system from the aft flight deck my right hand is on the rotational hand controller which we use to control the pitch yaw and roll of the arm and my left hand is actually just resting on an orbiter controller but above it the square shaped controller is what we put our left hand on for translation X, Y and Z to maneuver the remote manipulator system. Well thanks to some of the folks we recognized earlier today Alan Bartos and his gang and it has broken her gang each morning one of the first things we got to see was a bunch of messages that were kind of faxed up to the discovery to inform us of the changes and the updates and our big we call it a flight plan it could be planned for the rest of the day. As you can see it's quite a lot of quite a lot of pages this is about 50 pages that day I think we have to go through all those pages and sort them out put them in the correct books and get them organized for the day's activities and also if you look up by my head you can see a bunch of legs and stuff it's right after the wake up so it's a very very busy time on the shuttle everyone's getting cleaned up for work and getting things sorted out so each morning we did that operation so that we could carry on a very efficient rest of the day well for some of the payload operations we did I'm working a mid-deck secondary experiment called BRIC which is bioactor excuse me biological research in canisters and it's actually if you look I have some gloves on and I'm opening a container of liquid nitrogen and I'm putting some samples in that to preserve them for the rest of the mission it's pretty simple but all payloads that we have on the mission just take time on the crew day and each one's important and we try to make sure we get all those done according to that plan that we had earlier this is a view of our payload over Korea payload bay that is over Korea and this is what it looked like when we were looking out the aft windows of the shuttle in the front you can see the the manipulator flight demonstration test the Japanese robot arm and it is stowed in this configuration Steven I operated the MFD which is a lot easier to say than manipulator flight demonstration we operated the MFD from this workstation that was in the aft flight deck we also had two hand controllers for this arm the again the translation went on the left for X, Y, Z and the rotational one on the right for pitch our roll and then the laptop computer in the center showed us what the arm was doing some other parameters that we needed to know and we looked at the TV monitors just behind my head to actually get a view of what was going on on my headband in honor of the Japanese it says MS Ichiban which means MS-1 here's the view of myself working with the again with the microgravity vibration isolation mount this work is really designed to better understand some of the challenges we face with doing sensitive fluid physics and material science and crystal growth experiments on the space station many of these will be affected by the vibrations of station and MIM which is the little purple thing lower half of the double enclosure just in front of me actually is a magnetic levitation system that will isolate many of these experiments from the vibrations of station on this flight we were looking at two different things one how well MIM works as an isolator and how clean an environment it can provide to the experiments and then using the MIM with the experiments mounted on top of it looking at the effect of the vibrations on the experimental results both for isolated situation and sometimes running in non-isolation mode and sometimes using MIM to actually vibrate the experiment with controlled acceleration levels and this is me with one of the fluid cells that we're using this particular cells is designed to study the interaction or the dynamics of a interface between the fluid and the vapor above the interface I will spin this cell on the MIM to establish a void right in the center of a cell and then look at the dynamics of the interface between the fluid and the void here this is sort of a fundamental problem typical of many experiments we'll do on space station later on. Here's another secondary experiment on the mid-deck protein crystal growth and along with protein crystal growth we had 630 chambers of proteins that on flight day 2 activated and the reason we fly proteins in space is that in the microgravity environment the proteins will grow more perfectly sometimes larger but not necessarily always larger but more perfectly and by flying proteins if we can form them more perfectly then they kind of serve as keys to solve the puzzle to all kinds of different diseases that are out there and also can help us come up with medications but typically what's flown are different HIV virus or antibodies some cancer studies different liver proteins for liver prevention for liver disease and it's a very important part of flying in the microgravity environment one of the great things that the opportunities of having a space shuttle gives you is to go up and study things that are temporary such as a visitor from outer space called a comet and the comet hail bop we were fortunate enough to be able to go up and study hail bop from our perch above the Earth's atmosphere in discovery the black looking canister in there in my hands my carefully gloved hands was a small telescope looking out the side hatch window that's the hatch that we crawl in and out with the orbiter on launch and landing and it's got about an 8 inch window in it this telescope was bolted to the hatch and looked out that window and we were able to use the whole orbiter to do some really fantastic mathematics and effort by folks here on the ground point the whole orbiter at the comet zero in with some controls you can probably see there with the telescope and get some pictures in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum that you really can't get from the ground and this was all recorded on a digital camera you can see at the very end there to the back of the telescope with the wires coming out of it looks like another combustion experiment waiting to happen but it's not I didn't know this photograph was going to look like this when it was taken nor did I choose it to be in the group but I'm going to talk about it another good reason to go into spaces to study what happens to human bodies physiology does change and the adaptation process is fascinating and one of the things you have to adapt to is changing your sleep cycles and when you wake up and we did quite a bit of that both in preparation for the flight and during the flight and there's a study to try to ascertain what happens to the human body in situations like that both on the ground and in space you can see on my arm there wrapped around in white there there's a little module that records we were at Curt and I were one of these the whole flight and it records our arm movements with a thermometer inside and also a light sensor and what I'm really doing is a little cotton wad for a saliva sample really as I mentioned earlier bioreactor was a very important secondary payload we had on the mid-deck and here I am stowing a sample of the media that the cancer cells were growing in a few times a day I would take samples of the media to check the metabolic rate and also take a few of the cells out and fix them or preserve them so they can be studied later it's hoped that by using the Zergy environment to grow the cells in three dimensions sort of like they would in a tumor we can learn a lot more about how cells grow in the human body and more specifically how colon cancer grows in the human body and hopefully this will aid in colon cancer research and help us defeat that disease at some point well one of the big parts of space flight is learning about personal hygiene showering without a shower it's kind of an interesting thing and they have a rinse-less shampoo and rinse-less soap and this is me I think the first or second time I shampooed in space and it was kind of interesting you put it in, it lathers up and you just wipe it out with a towel and actually it works pretty well the earlier in the video I put my shirt on and if I were built like him I wouldn't have mine on either but the exercise is important in space obviously because we're in the microgravity environment and our muscles don't have to support our weight we can very rapidly so I tried daily I think I missed two days in the flight daily to ride the stationary bike for 30 minutes and it just helps your recovery on landing day as well as thereafter from the process and if I look like Bamer I wouldn't have my shirt on on my computer either but one of the neat things that we're able to do on orbit during post-sleep and pre-sleep time when we're not actually working payloads as we can receive mail from our family and friends and stuff here on the ground so that's one of the things I'm doing also we had a record flight we had 11 of the laptop computers on board computer you see I'm working with we had 11 on board due to all the activities as we mentioned earlier we had a busy flight and all the payloads they had their own computers following those days of hard work and lots of exercise there and washing your hair you do have to spend a little bit of time sleeping sleeping in space is a little bit different sleeping on the ground for one you don't have a mattress to lie on so if you tried that you would just float off the mattress and your blanket would float away so we use sleeping bags and just tie these down to any convenient spot I happen to be tied to the floor here my grandma was tied above me at the ceiling and Jan and Steve were tied to the wall above my head in this picture and you just let your body relax and where my hands are in this position it's just a natural place at your hands goal if you're completely relaxed and without the effect of gravity trying to pull them down they just float in front of your face then notice I don't have a pillow here first couple of nights there is a pillow attached to the sleeping bag and you can kind of tie that to your head just to give you the comfortable feeling of being at home sleeping on your bed but after a couple of days you don't bother with a pillow and just let your head float around one of the pleasures of coming back from space is you get to lie on a bed and feel that thing against your back but it's great doing this stuff in space another thing that's a lot more difficult to do in space is to get control of my hair every morning I would attempt to do that and I'd have some great tape nearby brush out all the stray hairs and I would always tie it back in a ponytail during the day so that it wouldn't get in the way of the equipment and everything and whenever I would go up to the flight deck before I'd tied it back I got a lot of flack from my crew because my hair would take up the whole window and they couldn't see out the window so I just made sure that I tied it back every day every crew takes a crew portrait in space and we thought we would take advantage of the fact that we no longer have the airlock inside of the mid-deck and we have this is the second flight of the external airlock on Discovery so it's out in the payload bay and it leaves this really nice volume in the mid-deck so we thought we'd take advantage of that and as you can tell our crew has a lot of fun together and we had a lot of fun making this picture too here's a picture of the forward flight deck on the Iran debut day and it's a nice way to show what kind of teamwork's involved in doing a rendezvous. Here we are going through a little briefing at the start of the rendezvous day with Kurt in the commander's seat and myself in the pilot being we're down in the MS-2 position and it's too bad you can't even pan out more with the camera because you'd see the other three crew mates in the aft flight deck it's a very busy place on rendezvous day and as I kind of alluded to earlier it really is a full team effort and this was the effort that we were going after on flight day 10 and again it was mentioned in the video but just like the ad was an ideal satellite the Germans that ran Krista as well as the American instruments that were on board all performed flawlessly and we were very excited to get that news back up to us in the daily summaries on how well Krista was doing and she performed awesome and she was very very stable during the rendezvous forest to grapple her. Of course during the rendezvous process there's a lot of information coming into the cockpit and being processed by everybody on board especially Kurt when he's flying the vehicle by hand and we have some fairly complex sensors and some fairly simple ones too this is a hand held laser just a battery powered little box with a trigger on it and I'm sighting up through the overhead window at the spas when it's not too far away and it sounds like a laser pulse a timed laser pulse counts how much time it takes to get there bounce off the target and come back and tell us how far the spas is away to within inches once the payload is on the arm or for other reasons for moving the arm this is how we do it facing aft in the baseball cap and all looking out the back window actually that was really useful for two reasons so that my crew wouldn't make fun of my hair so much and so that it would keep the bright sun out of your eyes sometimes the lighting conditions are very dramatic up there it was kind of surprising to me you just don't see sun that bright there on earth so it was great to have sunglasses and hats and stuff to protect yourself sometimes you can see the word Canada written on the robot arm or the remote manipulator system our long 60 foot arm provided by the Canadian Space Agency which did a great job for us we had it out and busy almost every day Jen deployed the satellite with it and retrieved it and I was able to move the satellite around to do some space station construction tests also and as we said many times earth observation is a very important part of every mission we have probably one of the best views of the earth than anybody's ever had I think this was the thing that surprised me most it's hard to describe although we're going to try in a little while describe how beautiful the earth is from 160 miles or 138 miles up I'm using a Hasselblad 70 millimeter camera here which is pretty much the main stay of the earth observation camera systems we use and I'm shooting out of the aft windows of the flight deck actually out of the overhead windows here and of course if you're going to shoot a lot of film you have to load a lot of film and unfortunately there's no dark room in the orbiter so we have a dark bag instead and you put all the fresh film and the magazine that's been exposed inside of it and you pretty much change it by feel and I was lucky enough to get to do that about 40 times but it's a pretty incredible experience to be able to fly on a vehicle like the shuttle and look at this beautiful earth of ours and in this view what an added bonus and this flight was we were in the high inclination orbit so we get to see a majority of the earth in this flight and this picture here you can see if you know the shape of a little country called Iceland which is where I was born it's just off below the horizon to the right of the orbiter's tail and to be able to see a country so far north of the equator is really quite an amazing thing and it's very pretty colors in the ocean here and it's very beautiful view and it's even better when you're up there able to see it with your own eyes here's a view of my hometown which is Montreal in Quebec up in Canada the big island in the middle of the St. Lawrence river that runs horizontally across the lower half of the picture is Montreal itself a little bit above that right in the middle of the picture you can see the Mirabelle International Airport you can see quite a bit of detail in the land from space and a lot of these not only are they pretty to look at they give geographer version geologists and meteorologists a lot of information that they can use to better understand this earth that we live on in this shot the orbiter is actually about over the middle of British Columbia which is the most westerly province in Canada and we're looking down south from there in the lower part of the picture you can see the city of Vancouver and some of the silt coming out of the Fraser River into the Georgian Bay Vancouver Island just to the right in the lower half and then the Puget Sound the Olympic Peninsula and up just above the center of the picture the Seattle area and right near the top the Portland area and the Washington-Oregon border and the Mount Rainier there's just in the upper left corner of the picture there just a lot of very incredibly good pretty views of the earth that we live on this is actually the Danzig actually Gdansk a city on the Polish Baltic border and we passed over this quite a bit and it was very distinct the ice lip of land there protecting the harbor for Gdansk and I'm sorry I called it Danzig but being an amateur historian I took this picture a lot because of the historical nature of the city and the parts it played during the 20th century you can also see up in the Baltic towards the top of the photo is a large plankton bloom in the Baltic sea which is kind of rare for the colder waters up there but you can see it as a swirled brown pattern in the water this is a picture actually of the Alps you see them running in the left-hand corner all the white-cap mountains and Austria and also southern Germany Bavaria to be exact going through the mountains through the Alps you can see the In River cutting a valley there and you can see Innsbruck about one-third the way down from the left side in there and if you see the two lakes that dominate the upper center of the picture to the right of them is actually a grayish brown area and that's the city of Munich with its large international airport to the right of it here's a photo of the east Mediterranean that's the water you're looking at and the land portion you see Lebanon and about if you go start at the top and come down about a third of the way the point that jets out into the Mediterranean that's Beirut, Lebanon and it's interesting just inland from Beirut you can see the mountains and the ridges and some greens and vegetation but if you go further a little bit further inland from Beirut that's the Bacaw valley and you can see the shape of the different vegetations in that valley and if you go further inland from there that's the desert area that's in Syria if you move to the bottom of the slide about the bottom third of the slide is Israel and you just barely see the tip of the Sea of Galilee in Israel as well on this slide on this slide it's interesting that the robotic arm is right through the field of you and guys like me that were shooting a lot of earth ops photos of how I was always talking to Jan and Steve saying hey can't you move that arm out of the way they were pretty busy using the arm we were a very busy flight so that is an indicator of how much work was going on simultaneously on this flight but what we're looking at here the right part of the slide is Kazakhstan and the lake you see and the particular deep blue lake about in the middle of the slide is Lake Bacalsh in Kazakhstan if you follow the water down it cuts through a ridge and that ridge of mountains which is from 10,000 to 15,000 feet high it goes through what's called the Zungarian Gate and to the left side of that gate is a tremendous dust storm and that's really what caught our eye on this photo was that huge dust storm blowing through there into China well not only is the geography neat to look at but meteorology the weather that we get to see from orbit we showed you a picture of Winnie a super typhoon earlier in the movie but just to explain some of the capabilities we have on board nowadays the ground called us up and told us about Winnie and asked us to try to take a look at it when we went by and just so happens we passed pretty much right over Winnie just a few minutes later and we had a digital electronic still camera on board and we were able to take a few photos of that super typhoon and then it wasn't very many minutes later that we had a downlink capability to Houston and so we sent those images down through one of the computers that I showed you earlier and it wasn't within an hour so that we had that kind of information out to the internet and to the public so we've come a long way with our capability on the orbiter and hopefully we'll see more of that in the future this may be a place that some of you folks have been before on some vacations but the lake directly in the center is Lake Tahoe and to the left you can see the Sierra Nevada mountains and the lake in the top right corner is a pyramid lake it actually is only Indian reservation to draw a line between that lake and Lake Tahoe in the center there's kind of a gray area about halfway between them and that's Reno, Nevada just to give you some idea of what green tree type mountains look like in space and then the desert on the eastern side of the mountains also in the United States this is the Great Salt Lake in Utah the northern part is actually at the bottom we're looking south is at the top there's a railroad causeway that goes in the middle of this lake and actually bisects the two portions of the lake the southern part which is a dark blue here is very deep and then the northern part which is red is the shallow part and the reason it's red this time of the year and it really surprised me because on my other flights it was a pale blue usually but during this time of the year brine shrimp flourish in the salt water of the salt lake and this time of the year there's a lot of commercial fishermen out there harvesting their brine shrimp to use for fish food we had a very busy flight and once in a while in fact pretty often you'd be working away at something and you'd glance out the window and see something that would just tempt you to stop and thank goodness we had lots of cameras this is a view looking west as we zipped out over the Atlantic back at Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard and Tuckett Island you can see the sun reflecting off the water and the various current patterns near the surface of the water and you can also clearly see all the landlocked water on ponds and lakes and also a canal there on Cape Cod itself we did have a high inclination flight I know this is a dark photograph but it's amazing we have it at all I think this is the Aurora Australis we have a lot of flights down over southern Australia or even a little south of that so where most of our night passes kind of bottomed out in our orbital trajectory and this was just a wonderful sight to see it was fascinating and it was kind of a combination of physics and art being held right out there in the sky many of you know when energetic electrons come down and clobber in the middle of the atmosphere they will release the energy in the form of photons or fluoresce and they fluoresce this ghostly green you can see the tail of discovery there Bjarni managed to get this photograph through some diligent effort with long exposures and some very high speed film and I'm really glad he got it and we'll transition now from the Earth observation slides back into the final slides that we've got for you today we notice Bjarni and Jan are in blue what looks like underwear and that's because it is underwear it's been modified with liquid cooling tubes and we wear that under the orange suits that I've got to keep a school and we've come a long ways the last few years in keeping crews comfortable on the landing and entry day I'm in my suit, typically the pilots are very excited on this day because up until now the space shuttle has not been an airplane or a glider on launch we were a rocket and then we transitioned into an orbiting spacecraft but now we're actually going to become an airplane or I guess you'd say the fastest, heaviest glider in the world on this day so we're very excited as I mentioned they gave me the easy slides and no presentation like this would be complete without a landing photo we were very very happy to be back on the ground to see our friends and family unfortunately we were already missing our home and space and the work we've been doing we traveled 4,725,000 miles and we got together with our crew secretary and determined with NASA government rate of 30 cent a mile that we're expecting $1,417,500 in our direct deposit account soon I promise I will divide it with y'all but actually we had a very nice touchdown and as I mentioned before we formed flawlessly we had a very busy and very very enjoyable mission and it's always nice after we land we get into the crew transport vehicle to get out of the orbiter we kind of wash up a little bit get into a flight suit out of our big launch and entry suit and it's always nice to get out of the vehicle or get out of the transport vehicle and get a chance to walk around the orbiter itself to see what a magnificent machine that we all have created here that can go through the atmosphere and do the things that we get to do and again she came through in great shape and we're all very excited already looking forward to our next mission