 mission duration but great to be with you again. We'd just like to welcome everyone to the mid-deck of the space shuttle Discovery. We're on a 124th orbit around the Earth since our launch last Thursday. The mission has been going great. We've completed eight days of intense pilot operations. The folks at KSC has given us a great vehicle in Discovery. She has operated flawlessly for the last eight days. And just to let you know where we are, we're currently 160 nautical miles above the surface of the Earth and we're in the South Pacific and during the press conference we'll be passing across South America and Northern Europe. And JSCPO, we're ready for questions. This is Marsha Dunn of the Associated Press for one or more of the rookies. I'm wondering what your biggest surprise about space flight has been so far and I'm thinking more of the day-to-day stuff, not necessarily the scientific experiments. So now I'm a rookie and this has certainly been the how much fun and how initially awkward it can be floating around in the freefall situation that we have here and also how efficient it can be for storing things. It's been really going to miss that when we get back on Earth. How the day-to-day activities change. Getting up in the morning and washing and getting ready for the day is a lot different here and take for granted when we're in gravity. Like spit out your toothpaste and it always goes... You do that a little bit differently and the whole morning routine changes tremendously. That was the biggest surprise for me. I guess what I would add to that is after about five or six days up here, you get kind of used to the funny attitudes up here where up can be anywhere, down can be anywhere. It could do to working upside down and whatever. It feels kind of natural after five or six days. Japanese investigators say this is the last space test of the MFD. And I'm wondering, do you think it's ready for her when it flies next time on the International Space Station? Could you sort of give a report card please? It's an A-plus. It's really been fun for Steve and I to fly the arms through all the different scenarios that we have. And it's performed very well and there are some things we really could not even test on the ground. Some of the compliance functions. And we sort of feel like test pilots up here trying out the arm and we have taken it to the edge of its envelope and tested every possible mode. And I think we have a lot of good data and we still are learning a lot about it and we'll be ready for International Space Station. This is Seth Bornstein from the Orlando Sentinel. Actually, Jan, if you can keep this, just to follow up on that question, you've had little problems with the computer commands and you've had sort of stop and go with the arm. Has that at all been frustrating or annoying? Or is it something you just really don't even notice that much? I don't notice it when something happens like that, but as I said, this is sort of a test flight of this hardware and it's performed very well. And in the compliance mode, the flexible compliance mode is something we can't test in 1G, in the gravity of Earth. And so that has really been where we've had the surprises. So we really didn't know what to expect there and the fact that we had to play with arm a little bit more to get it to do what we wanted to do really was not a worry to us. It's something that was kind of interesting to see how the different compliance modes worked. As far as the ground commanding, that went very well. Most of the day we only missed one run at the end when we lost the computer lock. So we proved that the ground commanding works and I think that was really a real triumph to command the arm from the ground and that really proves that we'll be ready for that for International Space Station. So the few little glitches we've had, I think, really proved that the system works well and the surprises that we have had are understood and we certainly can work on those and be ready, as I said. And one for Kurt Brown there. There's a long streak now going this year and into much of last year for first day landings, first day attempt landings at KSC with very few diversions to California. Do you feel under pressure that you're going to have to land here at KSC on the first day? And why do you think it is that shuttles aren't being waved off for weather much in landing on the first try now? Probably the pressure's not on me. It may be on mission control. They do all the real weather investigation prior to giving us a go for the orbit burn, but we obviously trust their judgment quite well and we'll be ready to go wherever they send us. I don't want to say we're just lucky, but obviously every shuttle landing that we do, we always look at the weather very, very strongly so that we understand what it will do within the next hour or so after the burn. So we have to give a lot of credit to our space meteorology group. They do a great job at looking at the weather and forecasting it and I think they're just that good. If they give us a go for the orbit, we can come on in there. Pete Caltteri with the West Kentucky News for Brearney. As a principal investigator on the MIMS, I was wondering if you could comment on the status and the effectiveness of both the units that are now on orbit and in particular how the MIR unit, its results, have impacted on what you did on shuttle. We've been up there for about a year and we've learned a fair bit from that and on basis of those results, we actually adjusted the design of this one a little bit to improve on that. In the data that I've sent to the ground from this unit, the folks on the ground report back up that we've got about a four to five improvement in the performance of this system and that's largely because of the small changes we've made in the design of this system. This has been from me reasonably well. We've been surprised by a couple of things that we're dealing with and we had one maintenance issue that we've solved I think now and we're in operation here again. But the units have performed quite well. I think they certainly improved the vibration environment for experiments of the type that we're going to do in the next few years on the space station. With all these icy comets coming into the atmosphere, I know they're not ice by the time they reach your orbit but they're water vapor. Is it going to be possible to see if you guys are flying through water vapor or can you any test or whatever to determine this? That's a good question and this is a brand new theory about icy snowballs pelting the Earth from deep space and possibly a source of water on the Earth's surface or at least hydroxyl in the Earth's atmosphere. Where we are now, 160 miles out, we're well above the Earth's atmosphere and so we don't expect to find water or any components of water up where we are. But we have deployed the Crystal Spa satellite and the Marci instrument on that satellite and both the Crystal and the Marci are taking detailed explorations at the middle atmosphere and making new discoveries since we put it out about eight days ago. And one of the very interesting bits of data that's come in and this is very fresh data so it hasn't really been analyzed to its fullest extent is that there is a large amount of hydroxyl, which is a component that's both involved in the water being in the atmosphere and also is one of the major players in the destruction of ozone in the atmosphere. So it's important to know about hydroxyl and there's a lot of it in the middle atmosphere between about 40 and 60 miles. We need to learn more about that and I think the Crystal Spa and the Marci instruments out there right now are going to tell us a lot more about how much water is there and give us a lot to think about and Commander can you tell me what's the proudest accomplishment of this flight as you see it for you and your crew? We have to say the spectrum of the activities we have on board and the number of activities we have on board. As I mentioned in the opening we've completed eight days of very intense payload operations and all those have gone very smoothly. We've had a few things to slow us down. We've gotten behind in the timeline a little bit but due to the shortening efforts of the folks on the ground we're able to blend those back in where right where we should be. I'd have to be very proud of my crew doing all that. With three rookies on board they have to adapt the space flight first and then work the payload operations and they've done an excellent job of that and with all the activities we have it's going to be one of the shuttle missions that we can look back and be very, very proud of. And I guess one for Kent Rominger since he's kind of lonely there. Aren't you going to be doing much of the rendezvous activity tomorrow and can you take us through a few steps of what's going to happen? The rendezvous is actually a team effort with all of us on board. In particular obviously Commander Kurt Brand myself and then Robert Kirby have done the primary amount of training for the rendezvous. But the rendezvous will start actually before we get into the rendezvous checklist which is four hours, about five hours before the actual grapple of the satellite. Some of our burns will begin phasiness to close back in on Krista's paws. Krista's paws is approximately 35 miles behind us right now. We're out in front of it. And we do some phasing burns to raise our orbit to slow us down relative to Krista and let us close on it. We actually hop over the top of Krista and do a full circle loop all the way back around it and we stop and come up from below for a while and then continue that first full circle loop back around to being out in front of it again where we started. Except this time we're only 300 feet out in front of it instead of 30 miles and then we close on into that final grapple.