 Thank you all for coming, and we're going to present you with the film that takes about 15 minutes and it recaps the highlights of the mission, and then we'll go through about 20 of the slides that summarize some of our Earth observations and some of our living in space experiences. And then, as mentioned, we'll open up for questions. So without any further ado, let's go ahead and roll the movie. It starts off with our crew patch. I helped with some charge of design it. The whole crew put in their efforts. And you have the Earth in the space shuttle, and we've got the little triangle there that represents the TDRS satellite, the shuttle, and the MCC here on the ground. And it has a red, white, and blue of our flag, and also for the people from Ohio. If you look around the edge of it, it's in the shape of an ove, because this was the old Buckeye crew. I think most of you are aware we were delayed from our first launch due to this pesky rascal down at the Cape. However, our hats were off to the technicians there at the Cape who repaired the ET and successfully rolled back out for an on-time launch June 22. Here we are, suiting up in the room. That's Kevin Kriegel, the pilot. Dr. Don Thomas, mission specialist one. Army Major Nancy Curry, mission specialist number two. And Dr. Mary Ellen Weber, mission specialist number three. Of course, it was a glorious morning, as most mornings are at the Kennedy Space Center. As you know, we wake up about six hours before launch, have our breakfast, put the suits on, and then go out for a final chance to wave goodbye to all the folks who supported us up to this point as we walk out to the Astrovan. And that was the Buckeye that flew along with us that I showed to the press at that point. And we would like to thank all the support around the country, and especially that from Ohio, which was outstanding. Getting ready to get to launch on the pad. This was also the first flight of the Block 1 engine. The Block 1 engine takes a number of wells out of the oxidizer turbo pump from a little over 200 to about a dozen. So it really helps with the reliability. From inside the cockpit and our engine parameters, it was absolutely no difference. And it worked flawlessly. Getting ready for the fire suppression and the water suppression to light. And off we go. They always have the rookie say, well, it was like for your first launch. And of course, once those solids light, it really is a kick in the pants and you know that you're going to go someplace. And it's shaken a bunch, but it really wasn't too bad. And thanks to all the people around here, except for the G-forces, it felt like I was back in the simulator. And I was back in the simulator looking at all the switches, except you could feel a G-forces. And as most of you know, it goes up to around three Gs for the last two minutes of launch. And that's really the only difference. You'll see as we go through the supersonic today, on the day of launch, we had the right atmospheric conditions to show the shockwave coming over the orbiter. And it really made it for a spectacular launch just coming right over the SRBs and across the shuttle. And of course, after about eight and a half minutes, everything worked just fine. Beautiful day. And we're getting ready to do it. We're sent up there and that's to launch the TDRS satellite. It's a busy first day for us on orbit. As soon as we get up to orbit after eight and a half minutes, we start getting out of our suits, taking our seats down and getting ready for the satellite deploy. About two hours into the mission is actually when we start checking out the TDRS satellite here. This is the sixth and final tracking and data relay satellite that will be launched from the shuttle. The very first one was on STS-6 and this is quite a tradition. This shows all the crew members here at the F panel were looking towards the back of the payload bay and watching the TDRS as it raises up and here we're about ready to punch it out. It moves out very slowly here, just a few feet a minute. And it went so smoothly and nominally on orbit, it was unlike any of our simulations where our training team throws all the malfunctions at us and it just went so perfectly like clockwork and this is six hours into the mission as it's moving out. The top half of the satellite that you see is the tracking and data relay satellite itself and the bottom half is the inertial upper stage which is a two-stage solid rocket motor that'll take the satellite from 160 miles here out to geosynchronous orbit about 22,000 miles out. And as you can imagine our noses were pressed up against the windows pretty much looking at this except for Nancy trying to get a good picture with the camera here. And that was just a great feeling to have it go out right on time nice and smooth. It shows the satellite there in the distance as it's moving off and we started to back away from it with the orbiter and it's currently out at geosynchronous orbit. They're continuing to check out of the satellite and everything's going great with it so far. This is a dedication of the plaque for the new mission control center. As you all probably know here that we were the first flight that was controlled out of the new CCC or Combined Control Center which will be used for combined shuttle to Mir and shuttle station missions and from the crew's perspective it was totally transparent which was just exceptional. This is the morning of flight day two. We start picking up with the meat of our flight plan after the successful deployment of TDRS for all the principal investigators. You can see that we diligently reviewed our messages in the morning coming off the tips. And this kind of shows a little bit about our daily routine. This is Don taking his equivalent of a shower in the morning. You can't ever escape the watchful eye of other crew members or the camera. And this is floating over to the galley. You know all of us like to do stupid astronaut tricks and so forth on orbit and you'll see our equivalent of that here shortly. We really didn't play too much. Kevin's trying his hardest to form a ball of juice here but he found out very quickly he better have a towel handy when he's trying this. And this display has come my unique eating habits. This is a cream spinach which I ate for breakfast every morning so they felt like they needed to get that on film. This is Don in the ergonometer. You can see kind of hamming it up a little bit here. Although he was working pretty hard I can assure you. And we all had the time to exercise. We were all in really good shape at the end of the flight. This is the bioreactor experiment. It's one of the I think most exciting experiments on our flight. What they're trying to do is actually grow three-dimensional body-like tissues outside the human body. It's something that's very difficult to do here on the ground under the influence of gravity. The experiment worked extremely well. They got very large sized tissues. You can see inside the chamber right there. And this was the first flight of this configuration. And the hope here is that one day we might be growing replacement organs and really understand how tissues actually grow. This is an experiment conducted with the National Institutes of Health, NIHR. We flew 10 pregnant rodents. And we were looking at muscular skeletal development changes in microgravity. This is an amateur radio experiment called SAREX that we flew on board. We talked a total of eight schools, mostly in the United States, but we did talk to one in Argentina. And that was a great thrill for these eight-minute passes to be able to talk and share the excitement of space flight with the many students around the world. This is an experiment called the space tissue loss experiment looking at the development of Madaka fish embryos. Again, we're looking at embryonic development in microgravity. This is an interior view that's near the end of the flight. You can actually see the blood flow through the embryo. And actually they saw quite a significant difference between our downlink video of those developed in microgravity versus the ground-controlled studies. This is one of the cameras that we flew. It's a multi-spectral imaging camera. It's looking at thruster plumes and also water dumps. This is an example looking at the side hatch of a water dump with a Windex camera. And next you'll see a thruster firing that was filmed out the aft window. We did a series of primary jet thruster firings. And they're looking at the chemistry and physics of the emissions from the shuttle on not only the shuttle, but also other orbiting structures. Another experiment we flew was again used in a multi-spectral camera. This is called Hercules. It's a pretty big beast. It weighs around 70-80 pounds. And here on Earth we had to actually rig up a tripod to practice using it at all. We actually had two of us using it to aim because it's like looking through a soda straw and we're looking at targets on the ground. And the big bump on the top of the camera is an inertial measurement unit. And the hope is that we can accurately look at places on the ground and also be able to look at the latitude and longitude. There you see a picture of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And you can see pretty good resolution. It's jumping around there, so real-time it's a little bit tough, but it's going 30 frames a second. So post-flight people on the ground can really look at it pretty well. And this is a picture of a city at night. It's totally dark out for us in Australia. So the Hercules has a lot of potential and had a lot of a couple of problems in the beginning, but through the hard work of people here on the ground, we got it to work. And this is an experiment called the visual function tester. As you know, when you take away gravity, some pretty dramatic changes happen in the human body. And one of those changes is that the eyeball shape actually changes and the vision is affected. This is a picture of Hurricane Shantel, which was formed in the Atlantic. Luckily it didn't hit land, it turned north. But we got a good view of this on flight day two and three, passed almost directly over top of it. This is passing over Egypt. You can see the Nile River there in the lower left and coming up on the Red Sea. This is a beautiful pass always because you have the very light brown soil and the blue-blue water there. And one morning, shortly after our wake-up music, somebody peeked out and said, hey, we're going right over Egypt and the Nile River. And you should see us all scrambling getting up as fast as possible and getting our noses up to the window there. But it's a spectacular pass and this is one of our great entertainment mechanisms up on orbit. It's just to look out the window and watch the world go around. We were proud of this shot. There was actually three planets in this view. And of course, you can see something similar to this right before sunrise on Earth. This is Venus and Mars coming up just before sunrise. The advantage we had being in the orbiter was that we could set the cameras up on one rev and an hour and a half later actually take the scene. It happened very quickly, but again, we thought it was a spectacular shot and took the time to capture it on 16-millimeter film. You never get tired of looking out the window as Don's emphasized. And you can see the orbiter tail and ohm's pods in the upper right-hand corner. This is again looking out the window even at night as spectacular. This is over Asia and the Pacific and you can see the Earth glow, which I'd never really noticed in pictures before and it's real evident on how tenuous our atmosphere is and looking at the lightning storms literally for hundreds and a thousand miles. You can see the lightning going off and you can see how it propagates all across the continent all across the ocean. It's really a real pretty view. And unfortunately, the day before it's supposed to come back, they tell us it's time to quit having fun. And so we do all the checkouts. We're checking out the reaction control jets. We're checking out the auxiliary power unit. I'm getting ready to come back home. And this flight was really, it was flawless. For all the missions, our biggest problem we had was a cut in the vacuum cleaner cord. It was really a very clean orbiter. All the experiments were in really smooth. We're closing the payload bay, getting ready to come back home. It was kind of nice actually that we got to close the payload bay twice because it meant we had a couple more hours on orbit when we got waved off the first day. Here we are in entry. Again, as Kevin mentioned, we waved off the first day's attempt and here we are on July, the morning of July 22nd at the entry interface there. We're going approximately Mach 25 and you saw the plasma jet out the overhead window. We came across the southern Texas coast and some folks mentioned hearing us and seeing us go by that morning. Here we are making the heading alignment cone turn and rolling out on final. Again, I think most of you are aware we're diving at 20 degrees, 300 knots. We had light winds that day. Lots of moisture in the air so you see the condensation coming off the wingtip vortices there. Kevin put the gear down at 300 feet. Again, very responsive machine. The shallow training aircraft was an excellent trainer. We followed our guidance and all our training procedures and ended up with some excellent touchdown numbers on this flight. Kevin deploys the drag chute just after main gear touchdown. We de-rotate using what we call the beep trim method now and then the drag chute blossoms about nose gear touchdown. We apply the brakes very smooth and positive braking and come to a stop about 11,000 feet down the runway at the Kennedy Space Center. The story wasn't over at this point. We mentioned that we thought we were exercising right. We were eating right. We also slept very well so we had an excellent crew status at wheel stop. We stepped through our post-flight activities very quickly in the orbiter and set a record 30-some minutes for getting out of the vehicle and everyone was so healthy that they were willing to walk around the vehicle and we all felt great after the flight and that's a compliment to all the folks here that have worked so hard on all the countermeasures for rehabilitation to 1G. That completes the film. Let's go ahead and go right into the slides. Of course everyone has to put up their fantastic launch picture and again everyone is spectacular. We thought this one was exceptional because of the condensation in the air which made the transition to the Mach spectacular as you saw in the movie. I launched on the mid-deck and one of my first duties once we had main engine cut off was to come up to the flight deck and take photos of the external tank as it fell back to Earth and that will always be burned in my mind as the most spectacular view that I saw when I first looked out the windows and saw the Earth against the blackness of space. As we finally saw the external tank we began taking pictures and an interesting thing about this hopefully you can see it there are some light colored specks on the external tank and those are the places that the wood packers made their tried to bake their nest and those are the repairs and I want to add that all the repairs held up perfectly and that was an excellent job by KSC. I mentioned that we had a healthy crew on entry this is just after a main engine cut off we've completed the ohms to burn and we're waiting for the go to open the payload bay doors so on the flight deck we remain in the launch and entry because we wanted to emphasize the improvements that have been made in these systems the launch and entry suits are comfortable the cooling garments are allowing us to stay comfortable both during the asset and the entry phase and that's extremely important when you're at re-adapting to 1G to have a strong cardiovascular system and again our hats are off to all the folks that work crew systems and crew equipment. This shows our teeter satellite raised up to 58 degrees prior to deployment and as you saw in the movie it popped out nice and smooth right on time and it was just a beautiful sight watching it go with the earth in the background this is a few seconds later we saw a little rim we weren't sure what it was it looked like at first like a piece of metal but there was a little circular rim coming off and as we were watching it we saw it break up so we realized it was just a little piece of ice there attached to the solid rocket motor somewhere on the IUS and TDRS and it broke off and broke into a few pieces and we watched it float away and it was kind of sad we had spent so much of our life in the last year with our training team getting ready to deploy the satellite and it moved off so quickly and soon it was just a little speck of light out there and this is me with the bioreactor again as I said before it was one of the very exciting experiments we had on board and I just wanted to say a little bit more about what they were doing here we were growing some human colon cancer cells and the objective here was to find out how complex the tissues became and if they actually started releasing some chemicals that scientists are theorizing are the main ingredient for having cancer moved throughout the body so not only will we be able to grow replacement tissues or replacement organs eventually but as I said we can actually find out some very detailed information about how tissues grow including cancer this again is the NIHR rodent experiment this is the animal enclosure module there were five rodents in each of the two AEMs and they were also looking at circadian rhythm they were looking at mammalian development and musculoskeletal changes not only in the dams but also in the pups post-flight and doing quite a lot of testing post-flight on the animals and so every day we took some camcorder footage, took some still photos an interesting thing to me was when we refilled the water in the units the activity level increased about ten fold and it was very interesting to see the activity level within the animal enclosure modules at day one versus say day five or six and their adaptation to microgravity also this is Tom again looking out the window with the Hercules experiment as I said it was a joint effort it's a DOD payload, Department of Defense payload and we had several different problems with it you see we had a makeshift little site on the bottom with it some of the things with computer didn't actually work but we were working on orbit and working with the people on the ground and that's one of the biggest benefits of having humans in space is you can put experiments up there that if they have a problem you can work a plan and get together some good data and through the work of all the folks here we did get some good data on it this is the Sarex experiment or amateur radio and I'm talking to a group of students in Argentina here and I actually had their picture fourth and fifth graders down in Argentina and they were studying English as a second language and that was a great thrill for me and I know they had a fun time too asking questions we get about 8 minutes as we pass over each ground site to talk to the students there and it's amazing how many questions they'll fire out at you in an 8 minutes span of time we talked to schools around the United States I mentioned we talked to one in Cleveland Ohio where Mary Ellen her mother teaches in Euclid Ohio we also talked to a school in Troy Ohio where Nancy is from one of the elementary schools there so we had a lot of personal interaction with these schools both before the mission and afterwards it is amazing to me how many people we impact on a single 8 minute pass talking to them on the amateur radio because they'll have hundreds of students there asking questions and a few other hundred watching the program there's a lot of press that's involved the community is really involved in the program and the whole goal in science and math and hopefully we've stimulated interest and have some future engineers and astronauts and sciences here that will be working at the Johnson Space Center someday one of the things that we're taught is again to deal with contingencies and as I said we had a vacuum cleaner that had it cut on it it causes short and actually popped one of the circuit breakers Nancy and I are fixing it as part of our training is to have in-flight maintenance to go ahead and fix things that break and it's been done in the past we did on this mission and although we didn't have to use the vacuum cleaner again it did test out and we got it to work and we also do in-flight maintenance on other folks we didn't have any medical doctors on crew so Mary Ellen and myself were trained as the medical doctors just do very simple type of procedures and I'm just checking out Mary Ellen for possible dust in her eye I want to point out here you have to have a lot but we really want to point out with this this is the new bags if you're familiar with the old ones of the blue bags and as Tom mentioned we're in real good health coming down a lot of that is due to the rest we were given this bag has straps right here that can keep you nice and snug a lot of people have complained in the past when you're floating in a natural body position in zero gravity it can cause some muscle fatigue there's also a strap right here that most of the time I would have to begin in a sleep put that over my head to put your head against a a pillow it gives you a little bit of pressure makes you feel like 1g and behind what you can't see are some springs so that you can stretch it out so it has a little bit of firmness and I think that development of that sleeping bag has really helped out with our sleep and contributed to being so well after landing moving on to Earth observations this is the lascar and we first saw this on my previous flight in 1993 on STS-55 it had erupted about a week before that launch and it's been active ever since and I was very pleased to see lascar was still providing some plume for us to observe and you can also see the line of volcanoes that are formed as the ridges or tectonic plates are pushed together and this is a very dramatic shot showing the geology in that area this is a shot of Buenos Aires and you can see the majority of the city is down near the bottom of the frame the beautiful bay the Copacabana beach the Ipanema beach Sugarloaf mountain and this is an infrared shot so the vegetation that you would see green on a visual scene shows up right here so you can see the vast amounts of green vegetation north of the city again the population that is in that field of view is approaching 12 million people this is a dust storm that's over the Red Sea there's a river valley off to the lower right here and it's bringing a lot of sand in from the desert area the winds are picking it up and you can see these plumes going off for 70 to 100 miles we saw dust storms like this over the Red Sea we also saw a pretty large one out over the west coast of Africa heading out over the Atlantic Ocean and it's just amazing how much dust is picked up and put in the atmosphere and actually transported over vast distances some of the dust from the western Africa actually reaches over to Florida some of it makes it into my house in Texas I know there's another in Mozambique showing some of the fires that are burning there it's wintertime in southern Africa and this is their dry season so they're doing some agricultural clearing of the land here just burning down crops and clearing the land for next season's crops but it's such an impressive sight going around the earth this is one of the most memorable impressions for myself is just the fires that are burning around the planet and to pass over an area such as this at night is really spectacular with dots of bright orange lights you wonder who is shining this bright orange light up at me and then you realize all these little dots that you're looking at are fires burning down on the planet this is a shot of the Tiffany Dunes which are in Algeria and not only is it a very striking visual but there's also some very interesting geological information in here this is in a desert zone in Africa however about 5000 years ago which is really just a blink of the eye in geological terms this used to be a very wet area and this rock that you see around here actually has channels that used to be rivers flowing into this so this region here at one time was a lake in these times it's actually filled with dust and sand which has blown over these ridges and filled up this area the different patterns in here are made by various wind directions blowing through there this is the Betsy Boca River which is in Madagascar this is on the southern eastern side of Africa and this is an infrared shot so again vegetation shows up as red and you'll see there isn't a whole lot of red in this shot they've had a great deal of clearing in Madagascar and not only do you not see a lot of vegetation but also as the river flows into the ocean it has developed a great deal of sedimentation at the mouth of this river and in World War II times there were actually no islands in this region here and you can see there are a number of islands these days which is a result of the clearing in Madagascar this is a shot of the Bahamas and the Bahamas and although it is a great shot of one of the great scuba diving areas of the world which will give you a difference in why the crew member took the picture and what it's used for when we get back but also over here you can see just a little bit of some of the whitings around the Bahamas this one doesn't really do it justice some of our other shots showed a little bit better but the whitings are areas of the water it actually looks like white milky streaks where the calcium carbonate has gone to the surface and by looking at the areas of whitings they can tell the amount of picoplankton in the water so oceanographers and biologists can both get a lot of data out of those types of shots this is a photograph using high speed film taken during one of the Windex data takes when we were firing the primary thrusters on the orbiter what you see here is not only the thruster firing but you can very very clearly see the phenomena known as shuttle glow around the tail of the orbiter caused by the chemical make-up of the thruster plume hitting the orbiter structure that's been a phenomena that's continually been investigated and will continue to do so and hopefully a Windex will provide us with some more data right here this is window 6 the right side of PLT side of the window during the sleep period the starboard wing was into the velocity vector and we presume it was sometime during the night during our sleeping period that we took a hit on that window it was only about one 16th of an inch in the depth right up in the corner of the window we downlinked some of the video we also took some still pictures to make sure that that area did not change at all during the entry profile and I guess it got quite a bit of press here on earth it was really not a significant impact to the flight many many times during flights you do have a little bit of window damage that completes our slides we were the quote unquote Ohio crew and that was just by coincidence that so many of us were from the great state of Ohio but Kevin was a good sport about the fact that the Ohio governor made him an honorary buckeye and we appreciated him going along with that but each and every state and the union is represented throughout the workforce in NASA and here at the Johnson Space Center we appreciate all that help and if we can bring the lights up one more time there's one thing that I'd like to include in this presentation and it's a bit of a surprise for two of the crew members because we normally do this in front of the astronaut office but we had our party so soon after landing that we didn't have the items that we flew in space back yet one of the things that we do after our first year of training is completed as an astronaut candidate is award the new astronaut with a silver pin and that indicates they are qualified to fly in space however they are not a real astronaut until they make that first flight and after that flight the commander traditionally awards him or her with a gold astronaut pin and that's what I'd like to do today Kevin congratulations and I hope we get to do this again soon thanks a lot Kevin congratulations again and I'll let you pin that on thank you very much for sharing this with us