 the PLT. This is Mission Control Houston on board endeavor the sixth member crew is awake now they're wake-up music this morning. Gloria Estefan's version of hold me for pilot Kurt Brown a greeting from his fiancee. And Andy the P.I says to tell you thanks all your words have been very helpful in describing this since you have a view of these crystals that we don't have here on the ground even with the video that we get and they really appreciate all the details that you've been giving them. ABC this is Houston please call endeavor for a voice check. Hello this is ABC do you hear me? I have three of the six crew members on endeavor from New York and of course you know Andy Thomas from just like to tell you that we've had a very busy and productive time here and Andy has just done an outstanding tremendous job as payload commander for all the experiments here in the space lab that you see around us. Two parts to this flight one is a technology demonstration where we deployed an infertible antenna and Andy had a part in recording the data for that and also smart data takes on that and the other part the major part microgravity science and Andy can go into quite some detail on all the experiments here that are going on in the space lab. Well Andy if I could talk to you this is saying good day from Adelaide. I wonder if you could tell us Andy what it was like flying over Australia and in particular over your home city. We flew over south Australia about 20 minutes ago and it was the sun was setting and it was shining on the Gulf there and I could see the outline of the coast and I could make out the city of Adelaide. It was really an amazing flight to fly over it. How much detail could you see? A good bit of cloud cover which clouded over one of it but I could see the outline of south coast beaches quite clearly as a white line. We're about 180 miles up though so it's hard to see and we're moving very quickly too. We only had the view for a couple of minutes before it was gone. With weightlessness in the in the cabin there how difficult is it to move around and is your boomerang safe? I assume my boomerang is safe. I get stowed somewhere where I can't get to it. Moving around is very easy. In fact it's a little bit crazy. You have to be careful because you can end up moving too quickly and bouncing into things. I'm going to demonstrate. And I understand you've just had your breakfast. What's on the NASA menu this morning? And some coffee. I must say I'm eating very well here. In fact I'm eating better here than I do on Earth. All right thank you very much Andy Thomas. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. We wish you bon voyage and we hope to see you safe back on Earth and particularly in Adelaide soon. Thank you very much to the greetings and my greetings to everyone in Adelaide and I look forward to visiting soon as well. Now if you let go of the side there what would happen? Would you float away? Stand by and we'll demonstrate. Experiment is a liquid thermal pipe experiment and that is basically an experiment that is using liquid potassium as a cooling fluid. Basically in normal refrigerants on the ground we use freon and freon is used in refrigerators and air conditionings to carry heat from where the work is being done the excess heat it goes to an evaporator gets cooled off and a condensation coil and the heat is dispelled but the transport medium is primarily freon. Up here we're experimenting with using liquid potassium which may be more efficient a more efficient carrier of a thermal energy away from hot sources. Right now we're going to talk and say special greetings from Westchester and from Yonkers. We're saying hello to Yonkers native Mario Runko. It's good to talk to you. Also we want to say that Cardinal Hayes High School is giving you a special hello as well. Mario when you were a schoolboy were astronauts your heroes who were your role models? When I was younger I had a couple of role models actually several. Growing up in the Bronx of course Biggie Mandel and Toto Machio were a couple of role models before when they first went in and go up and saw the good work that NASA and quite excited by it made the decision that I wanted to be an astronaut of course it wasn't till 35 or so years later that it actually happened. I know that there are a number of important experiments going on could one of you and it makes no difference actually who sort of address the issue of which may be the most important if you can in fact prioritize them that way. A variety of experiments in a module we're carrying in the payload bay called a space have module there's 12 experiments in there perhaps the most significant ones are crystal growth experiments which are trying to develop user semiconductor applications such as uh integrated circuits like you might use in a computer in a home telephone in a video camera or radio or some such uh instrument like that. In addition we think that another payload out in the payload bay we carried an antenna structure which we deployed on orbit and inflated with gas to prove that you could make large space structures with an inflation principle and we deployed another small satellite which we're going to be tracking in the following days to see how well it stabilizes itself in orbit. So this flight carries a number of really interesting experiments in space technology and space science. Which is the most important thing you're doing in this particular mission regarding that space station? The direct answer to that Tom is the the gain experiment or the GPS attitude and navigation experiment that experiment is using the global positioning system constellation of satellites and their information to determine the attitude of the space shuttle. We have inertial measuring units which you asked about earlier on board which which do that normally for us but in the future we'd like to be able to use GPS as a as a replacement or as an addition to or as a supplement to those inertial measuring units. If the information from this experiment is accurate enough then we don't have to carry as many redundant IMUs on board. We can maybe get away with carrying one or two instead of the triply redundant set that we have and use the information from GPS. So that translates to a weight savings when you try to get something as big as a space station into orbit in several flights.