 Well, I'd like to begin by thanking all of you, both NASA employees and contractors, for all your work, your very hard work in making the STS-77 mission both safe and successful. And, you know, when we were up on orbit, some 180 miles above the Earth, we were continually reminded of the tremendous teamwork that it takes to bring one of these missions off. We're inside Endeavour, and it's just humming along beautifully, and that's due in large part to the hard work of the folks down at the Cape as well as many other centers around the country to turn the vehicle around to get the engines ready to get everything ready to fly. And also to the designers and contractors who built that orbiter to operate as it's supposed to operate. We had the experiments working with just a few minor exceptions working very, very well. And, of course, that's due to the hard work of the scientists and principal investigators all over the country who designed their equipment to work properly in that microgravity environment. And then, of course, we were talking to Houston on the air-to-ground network and reminded of the flight control teams that are on the ground taking care of us, looking after us, the training teams that had gotten us ready to fly. And all the people, the rendezvous teams, the flight design teams this incredible flight together, this mixture of technology development and microgravity science. And it made us, I think I speak for the whole crew, it made us feel very fortunate, very proud to be able to fly in space and read the benefits of all your hard work. It made us feel very honored, very privileged to represent you in space and in a sense, we took part of you up there with us. And we'd like to share that with you now and show you some of our movies, some of the sights that we saw up on orbit and looking down on Earth. Before we run the movie, I'd like to introduce the rest of the crew. To my right, pilot Kurt Brown, mission specialist number one, Andy Thomas, mission specialist number two, Dan Bersh, mission specialist number three, Mario Runko, and mission specialist number four, Mark Garneau. And if we could have the movie, please, if we could roll the movie. While we're suiting up in our launch and entry suits, getting ready for the launch, we had awakened about five hours before launch. Here's Kurt getting a pressure check. Dan, these launch and entry suits protect us if we should lose cabin pressure. They're also a form part of our survival gear. Walking out of the ONC building at the Cape, getting ready to get on the Astro van and go out to the launch pad. On my right there is Andy Thomas. Andy in the white room up at the 195 level. Practicing a little bit of his activities there before he gets on board. We had a beautiful morning for the 77th launch of the Spatial program. The first shuttle launch with a full set of the new modified block one engines. At T minus six and a half seconds, the main engine start sequence began and shortly thereafter with all three engines up the speed were on our way. With the SRB booster ignition, Endeavour was on its 11th mission into space. After clearing the tower, we rolled to the Ascent Attitude heads down, which was going to place us in the 39 degree inclination orbit with an altitude of about 160 nautical miles. At this point Endeavour and all its systems were consuming about 3,000 pounds of fuel and propellant per second about the weight of your car. For a first time flyer such as myself, the Ascent was really an amazing and wonderful experience. I was on the flight deck and I could look out the overhead windows with a wrist mirror and I could see the flame in the flame trench prior to lift off. I could see the flash of the SRB ignition and then feel the lurch as we were accelerated upwards. Into the flight we saw a flash out the front windows as the SRB separation mode is fired, as you can see here. Then we could feel the steady acceleration that carried us on up to orbital velocity and orbital altitude. It was a wonderful ride. As soon as we got on orbit we had to start work. The first business of the day as you know is to open the payload bay doors and expose the radiators that align the doors in order to provide cooling for the spacecraft during its subsequent on-orbit operations. You see the starboard door being opened and will be followed shortly by the port door. In the payload bay there you can see the Spartan spacecraft and the gold-covered canister which contains the inflatable antenna which we will be showing shortly and which we deployed on the second day of the flight. When we first get up on orbit it is a very busy time after the engine is shut down to configure the rocket ship to be an orbital spacecraft. But the lure of the windows calls and everybody tries to get to the window to sneak a first view. While the flight deck crew was configuring the ship for on-orbit operations I was down on the mid-deck doing the same for the systems down there as well as helping each crew member un-suit and get ready for on-orbit. After the post-insertion phase Andy Thomas and I were on our way to the spacehab and of course a very exciting moment for us here where we're opening the hatch to the spacehab because this is where we're going to spend the majority of the next 10 days and obviously eager to see that everything looks fine and certainly from our first look in there it looked as if spacehab had traveled very well. Meanwhile pilot Kurt Brown is in the mid-deck also doing some more configuration on orbit. Here you see the ergometer which is sort of an exercise bicycle that Kurt is assembling down on the mid-deck. The ergometer is a very popular device used by all of the astronauts usually on a daily basis to get a little bit of exercise so that we can strain our muscles a little bit. Also on day one we had to check out the arm because we were going to use it later on for Spartan deploy and retrieve and Andy Thomas did all the check out on day one with the arm and also a payload based survey. After Andy checked out the arm and assured me that it would work I had the good fortune to be in charge of the deploy of the satellite. Here you see a view of the grapple of the satellite, the end effector of the arm coming over the grapple pin. This is a view from the camera A and the front looking toward the aft and this is the same view I had because the spacehab and the payload bay blocks your view, direct view of this task so we had to use the camera. What we had to do is lift the spacecraft up to a certain level above the payload bay and then bring it forward. In this case forward is toward the background of the picture where you see the two windows of the cockpit where the operation station is. In the course of that evolution we wound up flying over Egypt. Here you see in the background the Nile River, the Aswan Dam and Lake Nasser. That all took place in daylight. The deploy actually took place as we went around the dark side after sunset. Here you see the deploy. We'd have to put the arm in the grapple position and then back it away from the spacecraft and after backing the arm away, John and Kurt then took the orbiter and backed it away from the satellite. The deploy itself was in the night phase, but in the next orbit of sunrise sun sensors which were positioned on the Spartan spacecraft initiated the deployment of the inflatable antenna and its subsequent inflation. As you can imagine this was a particularly impressive sight. In fact it was spectacular seeing this from the orbiter. We were just 400 feet away looking down upon the Spartan and we saw this sequence that you can see here. Doors on the Spartan carrier opened and the antenna mylar structure was pushed out into free space as you can see here and then inflation started by filling it with nitrogen gas and in a moment you will see one of the legs of the antenna fill out with nitrogen gas, a bit like water in a fire hose. There you see it. Antenna structures like these have a lot of applications. They can be used for antennas for deep space probes. They could be used for radar mapping spacecraft of planets or earth observations or they could be used for sunshades for orbiting space stations. My crewmates tell me here that the legs look a bit like the number 77 when viewed from earth. This deployment and inflation took place as we're crossing the west coast of the United States and you can see that in the background as we're crossing over California and in a moment you will see us crossing over the dry lakes of Edwards Air Force Base. You can see the inflation continuing, the last leg of the antenna being deployed. You can see the gyrations that the spacecraft is going through under that action. The antenna when it was deployed was nearly 100 feet long, bright silver, and nearly 50 feet in diameter. And since we were only 400 feet away from it, you can imagine that it was a really grand sight to see from orbit. After a few moments, the instabilities created by the inflation settled down, transients settled out, and we got a stable antenna in orbit. This shows a view of the canopy itself after the inflation. You can see some ripples following the inflation process. We tracked it for one orbit while it did self-measurements of its shape and then we jettisoned the Spartan spacecraft from the antenna and the next frame will show you the jettison process and I draw your attention to the canopy disc itself where you'll see a shock wave that envelops the canopy as the pyros fire and dump the Spartan spacecraft. There you see it. A bit like striking a 100 foot diameter drum. The jettison took place again as we were tracking over the United States. We didn't retrieve the antenna itself. It subsequently re-entered the atmosphere and burned up a couple of days later. The following day we went back to retrieve the Spartan itself which you can see in the lower part of the screen there is a small black speck. And this is our farewell view of the antenna as we're crossing over the Midwest region of the United States. As Andy said, the next day we went back to pick up Spartan. This is a view looking out the overhead window. You see the Spartan at a few hundred feet in the optical sight. This is now a view looking out. A payload bay camera looking straight up. You see the RMS, the robotic arm on the right and the Spartan on the left about a hundred feet. Mark Arno very carefully getting ready to retrieve the Spartan and to grapple it. The grapple occurred at night time so it was a bit of a challenge for us to adjust the camera's form. Fortunately Dan did some adjusting on the camera parameters and we got a good view of the end effector. And here's a view from an aft camera. You see the end effector of the arm moving over the grapple fixture. John did such a great job of bringing Spartan in. It was rock solid. It was a very easy job for me just to move the end effector in over it and to close the snares and then to do the rigidization. You might observe when the rigidization takes place it's moving in the Spartan and also the arm sort of goes limp and it looks like everything's sort of shaking around a little bit. But after capturing it, the Spartan folks wanted to have a look at it so Andy rotated it a little bit and we pointed it at cameras and then we had to put it away. Obviously it had all the data that the Spartan folks wanted to retrieve to analyze after the flight. So there you see the Spartan being put away. It's a very busy time retrieval. You can see a lot of people on the flight deck. Everybody doing part of the job to make sure that we get Spartan back. And just in case you'd forgotten what mission number we were. Very next day we deployed our second satellite. It's part of an experiment called PAM-STU. This small satellite weighs about 115 pounds. It's aerodynamically stabilized and magnetically damped. The whole idea is to produce a satellite that perhaps doesn't need active stabilization. What you're looking at right now is the heavy end of the satellite and we deployed it radially towards the earth and eventually that heavy end did orient itself into the velocity vector. Again, it's kind of tough to concentrate on the small satellite in the center when you're passing over sites such as this, North Africa, the coast of Portugal and Spain and the Straits of Gibraltar that you see at the top of the picture and coming into the Mediterranean Sea again at the top of the image. The STU satellite had a series of laser reflectors that were designed to be tracked by a laser in the payload bay. Additionally, many of us used a handheld laser in the window and this was to give us range information into one of our relative plots that we had on board so we could maintain station keeping with the STU satellite. We station kept about 2,000 feet behind the satellite which is something that had never been done before and we did that three times. Kurt flew two of those rendezvous in front of the laptops you see right now. Kurt's looking at to the right-hand side you see he's looking at a station keeping box that and they both, John and Kurt did a great job of keeping us in the station keeping. You see the PAMP STU now is only about 20 degrees off it did end up with about a 20 degree cone. In addition to these rather spectacular satellite deploy and retrieve operations we also were lucky enough to have a space have module in the payload bay which provided us a lot of room to conduct some scientific experiments. Here you see Mark working on one a crystal growth furnace that ran very successfully throughout the flight and Dan and I working on various experiments in the space have. We had 12 experiments in all looking at the effect of microgravity on physical processes material science and some biological or biotechnology samples. It's a very good working environment to have the space have module and we enjoyed working back there. Some of the experiments were mounted in the mid-deck and here you see Mario activating one of the biotechnology experiments that we carried in the mid-deck for this flight. And of course we had our usual unofficial experiments here we have the ball of water with a ball of air that's been injected into it and a good demonstration of physics one image is inverted and the other is back upright and about this time Dan was getting thirsty and asked me to prepare a tropical punch ball which he very adroitly took care of. Well as with most of our shuttle missions our on orbit timeline was very busy thanks to our flight activity officers and however we did find some time to have some meals together and share our experiences on orbit. The mid-deck's quite small but on orbit with six people you're able to take available all space. Also other activities taking care of the morning mail from Earth for upcoming rendezvous and he's busy typing some family mail to be sent back down to Earth at next available opportunity. And on the mid-deck John is busy exercising again we all try to stay in good shape for our inevitable return to Earth and Mario is putting away the vacuum cleaner he's been busy doing some schedule maintenance that we do each day to keep the orbiter atmosphere in pristine shape. Excuse me Andy wasn't quite that busy he was catching some sleep. Back in the space have this is our sleeping configuration in the sleeping bag with a head restraint and a little eye patch and relaxed with the bungees across to give you some pressure in the middle. Personal hygiene is always a challenge in space Dan here is working with some contact lenses we do use contacts in space and they work quite well in the zero G environment and there you go. I think Andy and the flight design team got together to plan STS-77 so it would pass very frequently over Australia shown here. This is a view of the northwest coast Sharks Bay specifically rather spectacular just to when you look at the Earth the blues and greens are just spectacular. Here you see from our low light level camera looking down at the Earth over Florida specifically the flashes you see are lightning flashes from a line of thunderstorms that were passing over the state at that time and in the center on the left there that those lights are cities and that one moving off the top of the screen now is Tallahassee. Here you see a view a rather spectacular one moving over Mexico this is a view looking over the Rockies westward toward the Gulf of California Baja California and out in the distance the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately all great missions have to come to an end and that's signaled rather dramatically by the closing of the payload bay doors which you see here the starboard door coming in to close and you can see Spartan not looking quite so big in the payload bay now that it's lost its inflatable antenna but we proceeded through the deorbit prep phase as it's known this was choreographed by Mario rather well and he's taken care of people putting on their suits I won't describe the feeling of sticking your head through you probably can imagine what it's like but obviously we have to wear these suits and here we have our pilot Kurt Brown and looking out the window to his right you can see the orange glow that's beginning to increase and this is an overhead view through an overhead window and you can see those lights the light show that's going on sometimes rather spectacular as arcing takes place in the plasma above you we're now getting back into gravity as you can see John is holding this cue card up and it's about a half a G. in this shot we've slowed down from our orbital speed of 17,500 miles an hour to about 300 miles an hour and I'm hand flying the orbiter around the heading alignment circle at about 4 to 5 miles above the shuttle landing facility it's always amazing to me that this vehicle which has been our on orbit laboratory and and spaceship now is configured and comes down and lands like an airplane with of course one big exception there are no engines running so we're a high speed glider but very very versatile spacecraft and of course the only one in the world that can come back and land on a prepared runway touching down here a little over 200 miles an hour we'll deploy the drag chute to help us slow down our flight had covered about 4.1 million miles we're trying to file for frequent flyer miles and we've been around the earth 160 times total flight duration was a little over 10 days and as you can see it was beautiful weather at the Cape on time launch, on time landing at first attempt as we roll out to about 60 miles an hour Jettison the drag chute and a very happy crew after the flight but we've got a few slides that we'd like to show you of some of the earth views that we weren't we're not able to capture for you on the film I would just like to make a special thanks to Glenn Peterson from the photo lab who put this video together for us a lot of long hours and thank you very much for that effort our mission patch and a unique view of the orbiter rollout as it's rolling out to the Cape about two weeks before the launch dramatic view of the sunrise launch at 6.30 in the morning just as the sun was coming up one of my favorite photos a rather dramatic earth shot here of the some of the views that we saw there with the Spartan on the arm this is a you've seen the inflatable antenna but we wanted to show you this slide because it's over the Grand Canyon and if you can notice through the middle of the picture just slightly to the left behind the inflatable antenna is the Grand Canyon very beautiful in this sunrise shot and then later on in that same sequence we're passing over the United States during this after the deploy or after the inflation of the antenna this is the Norfolk Virginia area Chesapeake Bay on the right running up to the top of the photograph and some of that area the Rappahannock River at the top York River James River behind the antenna although I don't actually sound it of course I am American but I was raised in Australia and this flight was a splendid opportunity to see the country where I grew up and this is a view of the south coast of southern Australia from orbit and we had some spectacular plasters over Australia every morning the crew would alert me when we were coming by so I could get some pictures and this is the area of south Australia where I grew up flying over Australia is interesting because if you have a visitor Australia you can go to the out back it seems very desolate and not much topography but when you see it from orbit it's really very impressive as the next slide will show this is a view of an area in the northern territory of Australia called the McDonald rangers in that wavy form that you see across the center part of the slide but what is unique here is if you look in the upper part of the slide you can see a feature which is known as Goss's Bluff but it's actually an impact crater from an ancient meteor impact this crater is thought to be about 140 million years old and it's about 22 kilometers in diameter so it's a very large feature in the countryside but as you can see there is a lot of texture and coloring in the out back of Australia the next slide shows the countryside we saw following Australia which was New Zealand and one of the amazing things is you go from this desolate region of Australia to this lush region of New Zealand and you're struck by the amazing geography of New Zealand with its jagged mountains and snow covered peaks and very rough terrain and this is a volcano in New Zealand called Mount Raupeu and this actually is an active volcano it last erupted sometime last year with some loss of life actually and it's still issuing steam and mud active volcanic site it was very impressive to see these kinds of volcanoes from orbit. As Andy mentioned the volcanoes do catch your eye and here is one shown over the high Altiplano of the northern part of Chile in South America and the central part of the screen toward the top there what caught our eye was the steam plume emanating from the volcano you see here and interestingly enough this volcano was photographed by the crew of STS-55 back in April of 1993 and at that time the volcano had erupted and put out a large ash cloud as well as a lava flow and then a lava flow flows north here toward the top of the picture and then it turns left and what's interesting in just the three years time since the eruption unlike the ancient crater that Andy just showed you in Australia that has not changed its character very much because of the very dry climate there this climate being very wet the gray feature of the lava flow has all but disappeared and now it's covered over and appears to take on the hue of the surrounding countryside as erosion takes place and we had a quick shot of this view in the film this is a view looking westward across the western Mediterranean sea the Alboran sea being the western extent of the Mediterranean the straight of Gibraltar the rock of Gibraltar is actually off the peninsula that emanates from the right side from the coast of Spain there sticking out into the water to the left the rock of Gibraltar and that part of Gibraltar is a territory of Great Britain Morocco is to the left and the Atlantic ocean is out in the background of the picture toward the top rather spectacular view and sometimes we like to look in great detail in the last couple of photographs and sometimes just the panoramas take your breath away and here another panorama although there's a great bit of detail in here this is of the Sinai and Israel you can see the Dead Sea Rift Valley here the Dead Sea being in the northern part of the photograph the Dead Sea had opened had a is about 1300 feet below sea level and it had there was a passage that had opened to the sea many millions of years ago that passage is closed up and the water is now remaining there and that is the cause for the high saline content as much of it is eroded and is now fed very meagerly by streams and underground springs the Rift Valley extends southward to the Gulf of Acaba here and interestingly enough if you can make it out to the left center of the picture there's a diagonal line very faintly showing across here which is actually the southern border of Israel and even though this is a political boundary we can see it and the differentiation there is between the land use patterns the irrigation that goes on to the north of that border and the lack of irrigation or the natural desert state to the south of that border and very close to the last slide that Mario just described is another one that shows a lot of Egypt it doesn't matter what inclination you're on you're generally always going to be at this part of the world and it's always going to have clear weather so you get a good view of it and it's particularly attractive because of the history of the location and also because the contrast between the very green triangle which is at the top center which represents the Nile Delta and you can see it threading down towards the bottom left more like a ribbon as it works its way into the very dry part of northern Africa at the apex of the green triangle just a little bit to the right is Cairo and a little bit to its left is the location where the pyramids of Egypt are located as well you can see over on the right side the famous gulf of Suez which up in the right hand corner empties into the Mediterranean at Port Said and the lake that's halfway down the Suez canal great bitter lake and finally going further down emptying into the gulf of Suez always a very striking part of the world to fly over next slide please of course one of the most startling set of islands that we have on our planet are the Galapagos islands which are off the west coast of South America and we were fortunate in being able to see them several times in a cloud free situation the biggest island is quite striking because it does look like a horse's head and if you went from the bottom of its body towards the top you'd be pointing in the northerly direction and of course this is a set of islands that became famous because Charles Darwin spent quite a bit of time there in the 19th century looking at the unique animal and bird life on these islands and it was this animal life that helped him to develop his theories on the evolution of the species and natural selection and even today there are still unique life forms on these islands next slide please well this one is a little bit difficult to see but it's very important to me because as a Canadian I was not going to be allowed to go back up to Canada unless I showed everybody that I'd seen some of Canada during my mission if you look up in the top left corner you can actually see some of Lake Ontario and I have to admit I did not see this view and I'm very grateful to my colleague Dan who took this picture because he's also from New York and I'll let him describe the other part of it it wasn't until we were in space that I realized how close the areas that were where we grew up because where Mark grew up on the northern part of this slide or the top part of this slide I grew up in the south part you see these are some of the river valleys down to the bottom this is actually the Susquehanna River right here river valley towards the bottom center and left of the photo my hometown is just in the lower left center of the picture near Bampton New York actually Vestal New York and fortunately this was in the early morning pass it's why it's a little bit hazy and how the fog still lingers in the river valley so Shenango River right there next slide it seemed like every time a few hours after we woke up we always had a west coast pass very close to San Francisco you see the orbiter tail and just to the left of the tail you can see San Francisco Bay you can't quite make it out in the photo here just to the right of the tail is Monterey Bay anybody's ever been in that part of California and actually you can see some of the surface waves approaching the mouth of the San Francisco Bay next slide this is a town of El Paso El Paso happens to be one of the oldest settlements in North America it was first settled in 1598 it got its name from El Paso del Norte from the Spanish it was a pass through the Rocky Mountains this part of the mountains extension of the Rocky Mountains is called the Franklin Mountains the river itself if you follow kind of like the dark area and avoiding the mountains itself but the dark area comes down here and that's the Rio Grande we fly out to El Paso a lot it's we routinely stop there when we fly out to the west coast the pilots fly there all the time because they use it kind of as a fueling stop where they pick up the STA and then they fly to the north north is to the upper right part of the photo and where they fly towards New Mexico in white sands and do a lot of their training runs in the STA there next slide this is a picture a little bit closer to home towards the bottom you see the coast this is Galveston Island right in the middle I believe this was about in the middle of the flight you see some of the puffy clouds which I remember this day I called down to MCC and I said looks like a clear day but the only word that came back would say Bill McArthur said yeah but it's hot so I think that's when you all were having some 90 plus degree weather at that time while we're in orbit you can see this is a dyke that extends out and also here's the cause way that goes over to Galveston Island itself just in the lower center part of the picture next slide this slide is an example of one of the techniques that we use in earth ops observations we call it sun glint we use the reflection of the sun off the surface of water bodies on the earth to gather more detail with that glint we're able to see the activities and the condition of the surface of the water this particular shot is taken of the west coast of Florida of the Florida peninsula I should say the little island you see dead center of the photo is Sanibel Island and Fort Myers is just to the north or just above that on the coast and in Naples Florida is on the far right of the coast but with the sun glint on the surface of the water we're able to see quite a bit activity in this shot this occurred on Sunday afternoon and you can see all the pleasure boaters out the little V wakes which is actually the real wake behind the boat we're able to gather a lot of information about activities and conditions of the water from shots like this one of our most favorite shots here is I'm sure everyone recognizes is the our launch or departure site from from earth almost dead center of the photo you can see the shuttle landing facility the little straight line about a 15,000 foot long runway and if you look a little bit to the right of that along the coast of the land there the Atlantic you can see Bravo and Alpha pad 39 that we had departed from the northern most pad and you can see the crawler tracks that lead out to the pad from the vertical assembly building if you look a little bit south of that the little cape that sticks out Cape Canaveral you can see all the launch pads that have played such an important part of our history in the space program during the early days of Mercury Gemini and Apollo you can see the town of Titus field and also within the bodies of water about center of the photo you can actually see the inter-coastal waterway that the ships used to get up and down the Atlantic coast this is a good shot of landing after 10 days of a very successful and a very exciting mission we obviously have to come back to earth and we landed on runway 33 at the Kennedy Space Center the other was a very nice and early morning right after Sunrise type landing and John did an excellent job bringing us all home safely and we're very happy and sad happy to be back home to our loved ones but very sad to have completed our short stay in space looking forward to our next trip. Here's another shot of the crew out in front of the orbiter about an hour after landing and giving the traditional thumbs up again happy to be back safely after an amazing and very successful 10 days on orbit our closing slide is the sunset shot of looking across Australia and in closing I would like to again thank all of you for coming here today and for the part that you played in this mission your dedication your hard work and I'd ask you to keep it up because STS-77 is now history we've got STS-78 on the launch pad ready to go and next year we look forward to launching the first component of the International Space Station so we've got a lot going on in the future and I would ask you all to keep up the good work all the great work that you put in for STS-77 keep it up we need your help thank you