 good morning Andy second copy of the flight plan thanks okay as you know uh just as the satellite departed we uh disabled auto reconfiguration and therefore we should understand uh fully the configuration of the satellite and in our few passes we've made we've gotten two-way com with estol through estol and we have found some unusual unexpected configurations on the satellite first of all as you know there are three modes we can command to the satellite two of those modes do not require the onboard satellite computer and we are successful in commanding with those modes only uh mode three which requires the computer we were unable to command and we are not able to reset the onboard computer from the ground uh we were able to turn rope on sla on the pvla is flashing and the ammeter on we cannot command the drbs we've turned on the earth sensors and we've gotten good response to all this based on bus currents to our commanding but our data does indicate we've had a global ram a problem with data in the global ram maybe the ram itself for interactions with the ram computer that doesn't appear to be running is required for amcs processing and um so we feel that that's not working correctly the xy gyros are running although the z gyro and the skew gyro we found powered off in terms of the nitrogen system and this was unexpected in terms of the nitrogen system the tank pressure reads near zero the tank temperatures are very cold both consistent with a depletion of onboard nitrogen and our data indicated that both inline thrusters one and two and both main iso valves are open and depleted gas this is interesting because the onboard computer itself did not have the capability as you know to command both sets of inlines and isos open and our data indicates they are open we have another estal pass coming up in a little while we're going to make contact again we're going to command the iso valves closed along with the inline thruster valves and we're going to monitor response and try to be more certain that we're actually interacting with the satellite and not just seeing aberrant data the bus voltages are good all above 30 volts uh well the main bus is at 29.6 but the battery volts are above 30 we should have enough battery life to keep communicating with the satellite for one or two more days so we'll keep you status there's has been an event on the satellite that we do not understand yet yeah i copy all right and appreciate the call on that and also i guess the uh one and if it comes up you'll give us a call sometime about siding i guess here in a few days absolutely we'll keep you informed and still predicting seven days 10 hours i asked a group of sixth graders from right denny elementary school in west virginia to come up with some questions for you today and many of these students want to know if you were ever scared during the mission let me direct that one to uh to jeff hoffman and to scott harrow it's uh jeff you seemed pretty agitated when you reported the broken tether to mission control last saturday but what you heard in my voice was definitely an urgency that uh that we may well have to do something and of course uh we've always known that if the tether breaks and it breaks uh at a long distance away from the the shuttle you know the tether is stretched a little bit when it's in space so it's like a it's like a huge rubber band that you and if it breaks away from the shuttle then we've got that huge coiled rubber band that's why uh and the allen is as soon as i called tether break rushed over to the window threw the camera out of the way i threw my camera away and look at the tether coming back out fly the orbiter to stay clear of it uh you hardly have time to get scared in a situation like that because you really have to act and and if you're uh if you're really scared then then you can't do it so instead of coming back toward the shuttle we're in no danger and uh and at that point the photograph what's going on so that we can figure out after the mission what happened let me let me talk to inverto and marizio a little bit about the tether's satellite what did you learn during the five hours that it operated before it broke away from the shuttle i would say that we learn a lot about the electrodynamic tether in fact that we were able to generate power up to one kilowatt i would say so uh the experiment was running uh nominally and they were gathering a lot of data and i think that in fact even though the the tether broke and we never got on station uh we had quite a good data to analyze uh for for a while and we we can surely uh assess much better the behavior of the of the tether at this high voltage that was never done before and i want to to to point at the fact that this kind of experiment is impossible to to do on on earth so this is really the only the only place where you can do an experiment like that um there's another one i would i saw that that that satellite is is still working i think it's extraordinary despite all that it's been through it's still operating we have ground contact with it and i want to point out uh it's something which uh obviously we we we would have preferred people not to light up there now with 20 kilometers of tether on it and it will be visible from the ground uh it should be an absolutely awesome site because tether assuming that it's all strung out will be totally visible to the naked eye and it will be the only time in most for most people something in earth orbit that's other than a point of light they'll actually see a line moving through the sky people in the southern united states so i hope newspapers like yours will uh contact the over the world when they're able to see the tethered satellite going over because it it will be an absolutely awesome site in fact this is the largest man-made object that's ever been in space i guess up to 20 kilometers long all right i am um i've got a question uh for me for jeff what is the best thing that has happened to you on this mission to this point i'm sure there's good news in this too we have taken the challenge of of getting this satellite deployed and i think all of us uh had this wonder about what was it going to look like to see 20 kilometers of tether you know sometimes when i am driving home to work and i see a the skyline of houston and it's about 13 miles away and uh and i think gosh that's a long way and we're actually going to have a tether strung out between shuttle and and the satellite that's that's 13 miles long it's it's just extraordinary and we've now actually seen that with with our eyes and and we've we've uh we've actually shown that all of our systems work to get it out there and i think uh i think we're very very happy that we were able to get that far obviously um we only succeeded in in part of the journey we would have preferred to get to the end but uh but we've accomplished a lot