 We're receiving downlink benio from inside the surface tension driven convection experiment. There are several components to this chamber along the edge. We see the chamber walls, the other features in this facility are the submerged heater, which payload specialist Fred Leslie has recently moved from a point at which it was sticking out from the silicon fluid to a point where it is now actually submerged. He filled this container with the silicon oil. The silicon oil contains small particles which you see in the error region are floating along the surface of the fluid and Fred Leslie has just reported that he has obtained a flat surface and experimenters on the ground have confirmed that they agree that the surface is flat as is desired at this point in the test. We are currently receiving another video image from inside the surface tension driven convection experiment. This camera is an infrared imaging camera that allows the experiment team to look at the temperature variations that exist on the surface of the oil. This is mission control Houston. This view is of a television that was recorded previously on board Columbia over the past two days that it has been in orbit by the crew. They are playing that back now to the ground dumping this video down, this video showing the cargo bay of Columbia and the left hand payload bay door which has been in that halfway shut position since just a few hours after Columbia set up shop on orbit that halfway open position is designed to help further protect Columbia from any possible impacts by orbital debris that it may encounter in its fairly low altitude orbit of 145 nautical miles and also its extended time that will be spent in orbit of 16 days. This is space lab operation Sunsville payload commander Kathy Thornton working the controls of the drop physics module for the first attempt at deploying an actual liquid drop in that facility here on the during the mission and as we can see she has the drop suspended now still attached to the two injector needles and this first attempt as we heard a few minutes ago will be using a four cubic centimeter drop of liquid for evaluation purposes yesterday she was working a fair amount with the system but using solid test spheres or calibration spheres rather than liquids so she's proceeding slowly and carefully here to see if and there it is suspended and Kent Romiger now taking a few photos of payload specialist Al Sacco who continues to be working with his hands inside the space lab glove box he's in a fairly lengthy set of procedures to initiate protein crystal growth samples initiate the growth of protein samples rather using individualized or customized startup procedures for the samples and we can see two of the payload general support computers there in the lower left hand corner of our current view Thornton now making an entry on one of them and we also see that one of those pgsc laptop computers shows the columbia's ground track tpr session in about five minutes this is space lab operation Sunsville and as Kathy Thornton continues to work with the drop physics module Kent Romiger the stf-73 pilot now is in the module to take a few still photos to document the operations that's typically done to provide some additional information about experiment operations during the course of the mission Romiger on duty as on the redshift he serves as for the orbiter support functions that are necessary to provide the smooth platform that columbia has been providing so far during the mission and we obviously see the change of parameters causing some rather wide gyrations of the drop now which Thornton will be trying to bring back under control by further modifying some of the some of the inputs when we hear the instructions about obviously there's a rather large effects from some of these changes and in understanding what the result is going to be from particular changes it's a certain amount of learning process or trial and error Thornton continuing to try to see if some adjustments to the acoustic energy will get the drop centered up again and and reduce the motion and now she's actually looking inside the window of the test chamber rather than seeing the video it since the drop is no longer visible on the video monitors this was a drop of water just distilled water with the only additive to it being some small plastic particles that are suspended in the water in the case of this particular operation the water has those particles in there for purposes of watching to see how the water droplet is rotating and now we can see as she opens the access door to the experiment bay for the drop physics module and then we'll be accessing the actual test chamber and two previous drops were manipulated and and maintained in levitation for quite some period of time she has now after maintaining levitation on this drop for some period of time she's she is testing the procedure to contact the drop with the injector needles and suck it back into the containment system of the drop physics module and we now see that we know need to reply but dpm says bravo very good job a lot of fun watching it thank you and it is the flow along this top surface that scientists are interested in there are what are referred to as thermo capillary flows that result from the surface tension driven the surface tension variation along the surface of this liquid and the motion of these flows can be manipulated so that it becomes it goes from a two dimensional flow to a three-dimensional flow this is accomplished by heating the surface with either a laser flux or a by heating the internal center of this fluid by a submerged heater this in turn causes temperature variations across the surface of the oil and changes the direction of the flows changing from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional mode it is this transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional flow that the scientists are most interested in investigating