 I'd like to welcome you all. Good afternoon to the STS-61 post-flight crew press conference. Joining us, of course, is the seven-member crew. And as usual, with all of our briefings, the crew will show some slides from the mission, as well as some video that was shot on orbit. And after that, we'll take our usual question and answers from here at JSC and check with some of the other NASA centers. With that, I'll turn it over to the commander of the flight, Richard Covey. Thank you, Kyle. Well, good afternoon. It's really a pleasure for the STS-61 crew to be here today. A month ago today we had snugly tucked Hubble into the payload bay of Endeavour and we're beginning to embark upon the rest of the great adventure that was the Hubble servicing and repair. I'd like to briefly reintroduce to you the crew members just so you can recognize them in their coats and ties and nice suits. On my right immediately is the pilot and RMS operator, backup RMS operator, Ken Bauer Socks. I heard him called Sockslot during the mission. Next to him is Claude Niclier, Claude's European Space Agency astronaut that we were really privileged to have on board, served as the RMS operator. And also as flight engineer for ascent and entry and other orbiter functions. Next are the odd couple. They're called the odd couple because they perform the EVAs 1, 3, and 5. That's Dr. Story Musgrave who's also a payload commander, Dr. Jeff Hoffman. And last but certainly not least are the even couple perform EVAs 2 and 4. And that's Tom Akers, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and Dr. Kathy Thornton. We're going to move right on in to our film. The night essence is pretty spectacular. You look out the window and it's like a welding torch going off when the SRB is light. KT got to look out the overhead windows and I think that was pretty spectacular too. It looked like daylight behind us on the pad and I could follow it for maybe 20 seconds before it went into just light, just fire behind us. The vibrations and the roar is pretty much the same as in the daytime. Probably the big difference is up when you get towards SRB SEP. When the rockets go off to separate those boosters, it really flashes outside the windows. I'm just seeing that right there. I tried to warn these guys. Yeah, KT warned us but it was still exciting. The engines worked pretty well and the next thing you know we were up on orbit. It was a little sunrise. Because of the altitude of the Hubble Space Telescope, we got to go into relatively high, inserted into a high orbit. What we found almost immediately is this orbit allowed us greater views than we had seen before on any of our flights. This was what Houston looked like at night. In fact, you can follow it and go freeway down to the bottom part of the picture. You can see Clear Lake and Texas City and Galveston all in there. We never saw a U.S. in a daytime. We saw it at night but this shows you some of the view of the lights. If you see New Orleans, just going off the left side of the screen at the far top left is Chicago. Center screen is Atlanta. As we come across here, you can see the lights of Florida and up the east coast. Post insertion is a busy time for the crew. You're adapting to 0G and spectacular views but we were able to get everything cleaned up and ready for our stay in orbit. It shows the crew members at their different positions and being busy. Claude and Jeff and Story and Tom trying to work on our rat's nest of photo TV equipment over in the corner. It's our beautiful payload bay again. Just waiting for us to go to work out there. Here we're getting ready for the rendezvous. Before those guys could go to work, we had to get the orbiter up there. This next sequence will give you a feel just how busy it is during a rendezvous. Covey Claude and I were working up front most of the time maneuvering the orbiter and then Covey moved back to the AF station. Everybody else was busy taking pictures like with this IMAX camera, shooting the laser out the window, getting pictures like that of the telescope. The closer we got, the more excited I got. I was pretty impressed when I got my first view out the window and that's just what it looked like. You can see the blue glow from the earth below. This is the final approach to the telescope. Covey was flying the orbiter in a very professional way and stabilized the orbiter versus the telescope in such a position that I could grab it. The remote manipulator system had been already put in the poise for capture position about an hour before the final grapple. This is the final grapple we saw the target that I was using in order to position the end effector on the telescope and grab it and rigidize it and then move it in the aft cargo bay to install it on the flight service structure. We had checked out the suits on flight day two so we knew we had four good suits going into this. We'd spent a lot of hours training in the water tank and we were all excited and ready to go do it for real. Here we are doing it for real on EVA day one. Get up and stuff some breakfast down and you're eating breakfast. You start putting electrodes on. Those are bio-med electrodes to get the electrocardiogram off. Next thing you do is KT and Tom put you in a suit. Here's Jeff inside the suit. Then myself you check out the suits and they're all checked out. Depressurize the airlock. Go outside. It's an exciting moment when you first open the airlock and you look out and there's the entire universe staring you in the face. Here I am coming out the first EVA. Grabbing onto the manipulator arm while story is coming out now and I took a whole bunch of tools on the arm and the arm is now under Claude's skillful guidance carrying me over to where I'll get the manipulator foot restraint which will then remain attached to the arm. We should tell you some of these EVA shots are actually speeded up two or even four times because things move pretty slowly. This gives you the basic idea of how we work. One person on the arm, one person moving, helping free-floating. The first task, the gyros inside the bay here. I'm opening the doors and story is coming up and we're ready to go. And Jeff positions me very carefully inside and puts my feet inside the portable foot restraints. And here as we talked about earlier changing out four out of the rate gyros. Here we're working on the doors as you recall during the flight we had a difficult time closing the doors so with Jeff on the central handle myself I'm going to come along, we're able to position the doors and then work the striker plates and get them closed. And that was something we didn't expect. Here's myself getting a leg up on the solar rate change out for the next day. I'm just undoing various bolts there so when Tom and Kate T come along they won't have quite as much work to do on EVA day number two. While Story was doing this I was working on the fuses. It was pretty spectacular working. You can see right underneath the solar array there that this is a view from the elbow camera looking down from the top of the solar array and we replaced a whole bunch of fuses. The solar arrays were slued to the XY plane to prepare for retraction after the end of that EVA. You can see the one on the left is the one that we expected to behave well and it did. This footage is also sped up a little bit. It took several minutes for this slew to occur. I spent most of this time when it was happening down in the mid-deck and the airlock cleaning up suits and getting ready for the next day but I did pop my head up every now and then to watch the retraction so we know what was going to happen for tomorrow. The solar array, the plus V2 array which retracted normally. The by-stems are being pulled up in the cassette and the blankets rolling smoothly on the drum. This is where we wanted them both to work. The other one we could tell by a kink in the by-stem it was unlikely that that was going to be pulled up in the cassette, that we would have to leave this thing partially deployed. The retraction is ground commanded. However, we do have a stop command on board and we did exercise it when this one was retracting. It began to get a little bit slack. It seemed like the important thing to do was to stop the retraction at that point and let us take care of it by hand when we got out there the next day. This is the kinked by-stem. The by-stem is two pieces of metal that are flat when they're in the cassette and when they're released from the cassette roll up into tubes one around the other and it appeared that one of those tubes was eight or ten inches longer than the other so it made some loops in the by-stem. Story and Jeff were IVs. They put me and Tom in the suits as we had done for them the day before and sent us out to do our work. As I said earlier, this jettison had to be done and the disconnecting of the electrical connections had to be done at night because with the solar ray still deployed it is still producing electricity when the sun is on it. So Tom had to cut some lock wire and take some connectors off and open the clamp while I was holding it because the solar ray tended to flap and move around a lot anytime anybody was touching it. I held it up there and let it go with no rates on it at all. It was very, very stable. Claude pulled me back away from it and then Sox did the separation maneuver that pushed us away from it and you can see some of it as the jets fire the solar ray begins flapping and it looked like a giant bird giant soaring bird over the desert it was just the most incredible sight I was mesmerized for a period of time just watching it. There's not much more you can say about it you see the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden it was one spectacular sight. On the solar ray that retracted properly they were unable to stow it by ground command because it wasn't slewed in the right direction the latches were not going to mate when it came up to the top so we did that manually as well. Tom was driving up with a wrench although it was actually coasting on its own pretty much and I went up to the top to be sure that I had my hand on it when it got close to the telescope so we didn't do any damage by slamming it in. We removed that one put it on the solar ray carrier it's been brought back to Earth for people to study and see what life is like in orbit for three years of orbit for solar rays and what we can do to future solar rays to make them better. This was our first mass handling exercise it weighs between three and four hundred pounds and it moves as if it's nothing just put your hand on it and pretty much just the natural forces in the suit caused your hands to want to be in a semi-closed position and that's all it takes to hang on to it. I held it in place while Tom closed the clamp to mechanically connect it to the telescope and then I came down to help with the electrical connections the connectors are driven in place by one drive screw and we were very very concerned about stripping that screw because it hadn't happened in ground testing at times so we opted to drive that by hand very very gently so that we would feel if there were any kind of torques that we weren't expecting we could back off and try it again. After each EVA we had to go through it it was really about a three hour process to clean up the old suits pack them up for the night get the new suits out before we're ready to go and here we are on the third EVA we talked about the use of these search lights from inside this is a good example of what it was like working at night and the people inside and here I am putting the guide studs these little two ended bolts into the wide field planetary camera this is so that this hand hold that I'm picking up now we can then attach it and we have a little set of nuts which we then put on top of those guide bolts or guide studs as we call them so we take the hand hold up we install it onto the whiff pick you can see Story free floating over at the right he's going to get into the foot restraint right below him I'm undoing the bolts here that hold the whiff pick in and then the two of us working together actually pull the whiff pick one out from the telescope and it slides out on some tracks and it just came out really beautifully Claude doing the driving on the arm Claude did this so beautifully it was hardly necessary to say what you wanted to do he almost anticipated where we needed to be both Claude and Sox did an incredible job driving the arm we stowed the whiff pick one on the side of the shuttle in the temporary stowage bracket there and then extracted the whiff pick number two and remember this is about four times real speed we were doing this very slowly that you probably wouldn't want to watch the whole thing in real time but it came out without a hitch and then the delicate process of inserting it in again with me on one side and Story on the other side went very well just beautifully this was a very finely designed instrument for EVA repair and handling it's a good example of what you can do when you design something right Story was around back in the Apollo days and he had commented that nobody had ever taken a Hasselblad into space since Apollo and so he arranged to have this reactivated and there I am using it and we got some fabulous pictures with that here we are putting on the magnetometer it's a unit which we basically put on top of the old magnetometers so we never removed the old ones and then we screw it in into place and we put it about 50 feet above the payload bay so not only was it quite a view looking towards the earth but looking down towards the shuttle was pretty spectacular EVA day 4 as we mentioned the swap out the new co-star instrument for the HSP opening the doors there getting into the bay and then it got dark fairly quickly so we did the HSP removal in the dark and you can see the search light providing extra light for us there KT then took the HSP down and stowed it on a temporary fixture over on the port side then it came and pulled out the new co-star unit from its storage container brought it up and then held it here and then pointed the corner down toward me as I came around to remove the DOB or deployable optical bench protective cover all those little mirrors and co-star right in that corner and they're retracted down inside there and then those were deployed several inches up out of the co-star several days after we had come home getting ready to put co-star in again we spent quite a bit of time making sure it's perfectly lined up and again with only about an inch of clearance KT did a super job of just giving me millimeters of control when I asked for it guiding it in and she might want to say something about how it felt it was very easy to move but it was all I could see in front of my face was a box so Tom was my eyes to put it in that little hole this is getting the new co-processor out and then we did a swap out on the end of the arm and I got on the end of the arm and KT behind me there to manage tools and the co-processor went up using the power tool as you've noticed here all the bolts that we had to do accept those solar array connector bolts we used a power tool on and our tools really held up well and served us well during the mission coming back in this is a good shot of coming back in the airlock again this is four or five times actual speed I think you have to be really careful coming into the airlock it's got a fragile covering on it going out the end of every day we had to untether the MFR or manipulator foot restraint so if we had to get rid of it overnight it would come loose from the arm see all the tools hanging off of each of us as we come in you had to be very careful coming inside and then again at the end of each EVA getting out of suits and hearing tools and suits changing out batteries for the next day this shows Covey, Claude and Sox configuring MLI for the covers that we were going to put on the magnetometers on the last EVA EVA day number five and here's EVA day number five I was on the MFR day five and the other two days that Jeff and I were out Jeff was on the MFR so we took turns at that the GHRS that got it high rate spectometer a repair kit out here's myself and Jeff working on a the solar ray drive electronics changing that out there's not much to look at here it's just very intensive work doing mostly electrical and connectors for about three hours this is one of the more spectacular views up on top here looking straight down earth 370 miles we're getting ready to do the MLI covers that we had constructed on top of the magnetometers here's deployment of the main solar ray boom it just took a couple ounces to get it started down but the motors were unable to deploy that so Jeff and I just with a couple ounces on a wrench were able to deploy the what's called the primary drive mechanism but it's really just the solar ray boom here's deployment of the new solar rays, the blankets which will go out there and convert solar energy into electrical energy but this is the final completion really of the EVA here they were able to deploy these while we were still out and also be able to deploy the high gain antennas and all these things it was great to get these things done because they did have EVA backups in case any of these mechanisms did not work here we are coming inside after day number five and we never really did let our hair down until this final this final day here we've read the slight sigh of relief on each day because we got each day's job done but I'll tell you we've been working at this for years incredible attention to detail and we did have a moment of jubilation here although of course we had many weeks to wait to see that Hubble really did work this is flight day nine you saw the telescope in the back of the bay ready for release first we had to capture the telescope using the arm you see here the final approach to the grapple fiction of the telescope then we released the latches on the flight service structure lifted Hubble over the flight service structure over the cargo bay and here you can see the release of the telescope the arm is being pulled away and the socks are under the control of the orbiter for the separation maneuver after Claude released the telescope I fired a few pulses to get us back and away and the telescope solely started drifting once it was at a safe distance we put some cameras up in the window and I hope we got some good photos especially with the IMAX camera and that's what I look like a pretty majestic sight with that big telescope and it's brand new solar arrays drifting away we got lots of film and I think we're making an advanced screening here on Thursday or Friday of some of our IMAX footage after deploy we did this as socks talked about earlier had a day off I showed some of the activities on our light day and actually on every day reading the mail that we'd get up through our computers here's socks doing some trash compaction and management and KT's taking care of the laundry we also on a day before entry practiced landing with our new pilot simulator it's a little onboard computer simulation of the landing task and it proved extremely useful to us for getting ready for landing we had great passes over North America and Europe and this is a pass over you can see Sicily and the southern tip of Italy we just could see a row on the left-hand side and Brindisi on the right-hand side a little later we had passes over the delta of the Nile and you could see Cairo in the middle and a little further north the lights of Tel Aviv and the west coasts and here's the west coast of the US as we complete our trip around the world you can see San Francisco Bay up in the center Los Angeles down at the bottom Las Vegas coming into view Las Vegas is outrageously bright you can see the strip from 350 miles this is Houston take a look in the upper left corner and you'll see a very bright fireball meteor come through the atmosphere there it is you can also see Dallas and San Antonio this is looking up the east coast you can see lightning storms you can see a little bit of Aurora up there looking back towards the west now over Florida you can see all the way back to Houston we had a lot of long hours and intense days and when Covey said it was time to go to bed it was time to go to bed and he covered the windows and sent the kids down to the mid-deck with five of us sleeping down there it was pretty cozy you knew if you moved you were waking somebody else up but we managed to all find a place to strap our sleeping bags to the airlock on our get ready to come home day this is flight control checkout we're making sure all the orbiter systems are working we brought home everything that we had intended to bring home with the exception of that one solar ray and the solar ray carrier looks like a tool board in your garage with one tool missing so we called it our dead tool silhouette this is HST it continued to stay with us through the rest of the flight and we called it our morning star because we would see it every morning when the sun was reflecting off of it all missions have to end they end with a de-orbit and a landing hopefully and this shows us getting ready for a de-orbit and then the infrared pictures from KSC and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station of our turn around a hack and approach to runway 33 at the Kennedy Space Center like I said before there's nothing like bringing a space shuttle back to the Kennedy Space Center we had an extraordinary night to fly across Florida with the lights and to make this landing on the runway 33 orbiter flies exceptionally well for a big glider and we felt very good about safely rolling out to stop and bringing STS-61 the servicing and repair mission to a conclusion