 Columbia, Houston. We're set up down here for PMC on your call. No rush. We realize you're finishing up with the IFM. And we'll be LOS in about 11 minutes. If we get it in before the LOS, great. If not, we'll pick it up on the other side. Astronaut Dr. Michael Gernhardt, who is from Mansfield, is joining us right now along with Astronaut Roger Crouch and Astronaut Janice Voss. And Michael, let's start with you if it's okay. I understand that you're over the South Atlantic just about now, 185 statute miles straight up. What's the most significant part of this mission that you are directly involved with? Mission is to be the lead of the orbiter during what's called the Blue Shift. It's a two-shift mission. And so my job is to keep the space shuttle flying and working nominally so that Roger and Janice back in the lab here can carry on the very important science that they're doing. It's certainly impressive that you've been able to come back into space so quickly after the shortened mission this past spring. How are the fuel cells doing this go around? They're doing great. And as you can imagine, NASA looked at them with a fine-toothed comb and they've been performing flawlessly and we don't anticipate having that same problem again any time in the future. That's phenomenal. And we had more of an elliptical, when the drops were the same size, it was more spherical. This time it seemed to be more elliptical. It wasn't biased towards the larger drop at all. That really is very loud and clear. Leo, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, Jim. You're a lucky son of a gun. How are you doing? Doing just fine. How about yourself? Well, we're doing great. Y'all looking pretty good up there on SDS 94. I just went out there because I noticed a few minutes ago you were passing over the Gulf of Mexico and silly me. I thought I might be able to actually see you there in the southern hemisphere but either you passed too fast or there was too much cloud cover. You'll be glad to know that just as you were looking for us, we were looking down on you. We had a beautiful sunrise pass over the United States. That's why we hit Baton Rouge and Louisiana just about the time the sun was coming up for you. And there was a lot of high cloudiness that kept us to see on the ground really clearly, which is probably what prevented you from seeing us, because I think the lighting would be pretty good for that pass. Yeah, I was really kind. I had my hopes out there, but anyway, I had to come back in here and talk to you this way. Where are you right now? Well, let's see. Right now, we are just about to hit Africa. After having passed over the United States, we're about to hit Africa. And then, of course, from there, we head on eastbound and next stop will be Australia. Susan Steele, the pilot of SDS 94. Susan, you're a pioneer not only just for women, but for all of us who love the idea of space travel. What inspired you to be sort of an Amelia Earhart type? I was just watching TV one day and saw something on flying and airplanes and decided that I wanted to be a pilot and I just couldn't stop there. I had to go and fly the space shuttle. And how does Columbia handle? Commander does the landing, so I can't really speak to that. I have one to settle training airplanes and it handles kind of like a... Well, be careful now. Columbia there is just 16 years old, so she's kind of on the old side. Jim, I went through pilot training too. Didn't get quite as far as you did because I don't think I can get past those power on stalls. I kept turning those things into spins and I couldn't quite follow you on the SR-71 Black Hawk. But a lot of pilots here do wonder, is the Columbia for the most part on autopilot or do you have to take the stick and fly that thing? On Ascent, we stay on autopilot and we do practice in the simulator if something were to go wrong with the automatic guidance. We can't take over manually and fly it up into orbit. On orbit as we are now, we can let the autopilot fly it. Or if we're doing a rendezvous, which we're not this mission, but we have on other missions that we'll do in the future, we can fly it manually as we approach and dock with the target vessel. On landing, we typically take over manual control at about 50,000 feet or somewhere around 5 minutes prior to the actual touchdown. At about the time on TV, when you see us making that wide sweeping turn to line up with final approach, that's about when I'm taking over manual control. And I'll be flying it down and then landing it manually from that point on. And don't let Susan kid you, she has an important job. Not only is she backing me up in case I should do something wrong, but also she does such important tasks. She has put the landing gear down. She also popped the drag shoe down after touchdown. So it's very much a team effort. We also have a flight engineer sitting in between us and a little bit behind us and he's watching over everything. So we have three people up there on the flight deck and landing really concentrating on the task. By the way, speaking of Selma Field, we just flew over. Of course, we flew by Baton Rouge. That means we also flew by Monroe. And I was able to see the airport in the dawn there as we flew by Runway Short, pretty good in the binoculars. You're pulling my leg, right? No, absolutely not. We've got a pretty high powered pair of binoculars here. Here I'll get Greg to show them to you. They're gyro stabilized and it's amazing from my position just out of New Orleans and Baton Rouge. We could see barely far north as a matter of fact the twin lakes of around Paducah, Kentucky come into view. We can't quite see up to the Great Lakes but in any given direction you can see about 1,000 miles with the naked eye and about 1,500 miles with these binoculars to work. So it's just a fantastic view out here that you never get tired of taking advantage of. Okay, well how many fingers am I holding up now? Okay, that's pretty good. You're also telepathic. That's pretty good. Look, back to the experiments. I got to ask you this. Of course, we come from a prime timber growing area. We understand you're growing trees up there too. What's that about? Yeah, and that's one of the experiments that both Susan and I were helping out on. I should say we're conducting it. We do have a little garden back in the laboratory that we're growing pine saplings in addition to some other plants. It's a small box with a controlled environment with some pine saplings growing. And one of our jobs every day is to do video, take video photography to track the progress of the growth of those plants. You know, I'm talking to some professors at LSU this week. As well as people who are just outside the academic field, you touch on a very good point there. It seems like that by now we should have already had more manned missions there. And it seems like that the Mars Pathfinder sort of rekindled that sort of the romance of space travel, interplanetary travel. Do you suppose that we can kind of get back on track now and try to head that direction? Well, Leo, I'm not willing to admit that we're ever off track. You know, when you think about it, it's not even been 40 years since we first made our hesitating steps up into space, especially about 40 years or even less. And here we are on a tremendously complex vehicle manned by seven people with a laboratory full of experiments. We're up here for more than two weeks. So in that light, it looks like we've come quite a long way in a short period of time. But yeah, I think that it's a mankind's future to continue to seek, to continue to explore, to continue to go forward. And to be a little part of that is certainly a privilege. Any parting words for people who would be looking out there right now saying, I want to do this one day? Oh yeah, certainly. Any young people in particular, don't be afraid to have a dream and to go for it. Only good things can come from that. Don't let anybody ever tell you that you can't do something because you have no idea what you can or can't do until you put your best foot forward. So I think the message from all of us here on Columbia is go for it. Great. Well, we'd like to say happy Saturday to everybody. I know it's a resting for most people, but here on Columbia, we're still continuing to do the round clock science that we've been doing for the last almost two weeks now. What we'd like to do for free choice downlink today is answer a few internet questions, but with a little bit of an added twist. In addition to talking about the answers, we'd like to present some visual demonstrations to maybe get across the answers a little bit better. First up is Don. We have an internet question from James Garlitz from Lansing, Michigan, and James was wondering, could you tell me what fire actually does in microgravity? I'm writing my senior paper for college and I chose fire characteristics in zero microgravity. I'm having a tough time finding out exactly what fire does in space. Well, James, you've come to the right place for the answer here today. For the last two days, I've been working on one of our glove box experiments called Fiber Supported Droplet Combustion. The principal investigator for this experiment is Professor Foreman Williams. He's from the University of California in San Diego. This shows me working at the glove box and pulling out one of our fuel cartridges for the combustion experiment. Our samples range from ethanol, heptane, decane, and different mixtures. And this is a unique combustion facility because we put the drop of fuel on a fiber and that's why it's called Fiber Supported Droplet Combustion. And because we have the droplets on a fiber, we can manipulate them and position them exactly where we want to, where in some of the other experiments, they're free-floating in there. This is looking inside the glove box. This is our little test cell with clear windows on it. We have a fiber of silicon carbide running down the middle of it and we've been deploying drops of one millimeter up to six millimeter in size and putting multiple drops on the same fiber to see how they interact with one another during the burning process. We have a couple of burns coming up. There's two drops on a wire here on the right-hand side of the image. You'll see the igniter igniting there. The drops will ignite in an almost explosive manner there. We have an orange flame. It turns to a bluish flame and right now you can see that two drops is nearly invisible flame, but they're still burning and getting smaller and smaller. Here's another burn. We'll show it to you one more time with two other drops. Well, the igniter come up, heats them up to their ignition point where there's an explosive ignition just about. There you go. You see some sick particles coming out. It's a spherical flame as they're burning in microgravity because we don't have the convective forces like we have on the ground with higher rise and cold air settling. We can simulate the ground effects by turning on a fan and put microgravity and that's what we're doing here. We'll turn on a fan as soon as we have the ignition. It'll create a convective flow and you'll see the flame form a point similar to a candle burning on the ground. There's ignition. The fan comes on and that's probably a typical flame that you're used to seeing on the ground. Okay, next up is Sousa. I have two questions from different people, but they basically are asking the same thing. Matt Keesers of Ontario, Canada and Joe Margerone of Victorville, California, they both want to know how blood pressure, pulse and respiration change as we go into space. I'm going to take my blood pressure now. I know what it is from when I left. It was about 100 over 62 days before we went into space. And now that we're up here, I'm going to go ahead and take it. We've been up here now for Irvab, which is very close to what it was on the ground. I did take my pulse earlier today. Okay, next from the red shift is we have a question from Harry Seabrook in Hotchville, Hotchville, Hotchville, West Virginia. I've noticed that air bubbles in water on earth are pretty much flat on the bottom. I'm wondering how that would work in space. Well, Harry, we can't do air bubbles in water, but we can do the inverse. We can do water bubbles in air. And my able assistant here is going to deploy a drop of tropical punch. You're going to see just how drops of liquid behave in space. After all the vibration stamped out, it is a perfect sphere. It's because of the microgravity environment and the lack of gravity that we're able to do some of the research projects here in space that we're not able to do on earth. Okay, Greg. Okay, Harry, I hope that answers your question. So, space lab experiment go, push button for experiment 71 was on time. Okay, we copy that, Don. And as soon as you wrap up the rest of the LIF steps, we're ready to call it a day for you and want to thank you again for putting in an extra hard and long day today. I work complete with LIF. I want to thank Wade also for the great training that we had on the LIF. I've worked with him both on IML2 and MSL1 here. And he did a great job training us. And I know we're running out of samples here for LIF also. And I appreciate your help down there. Kimberly, you were looking over my shoulder the whole day and keeping an eye on the pre-tripped and procedures. And that was a great, great help. It really helps out up here.