Viewing page 13 of 63
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
10 the experiment activation by the ground on the morning of flight day 6, necessitating operating the student experiment during the cabin show timeframe. It is the opinion of the crew that the student experiment flown on 41-D was handled poorly at every opportunity. The guidelines by which student experiments are flown prescribe 1 hour of on-orbit crew time and minimal preflight training impact. The on-orbit crew time allocations has already been addressed and the preflight is estimated at more than 30 crewman-hours. Furthermore, flight planning was complicated by requirements from the experiment sponsors for periods of low-g, rejected by mission planners preflight but reinstated in real time. It is easy to rationalize that the system is at fault for trying to accommodate such requests; As such, of course, it should never have been flown in the student experiment category. It is the opinion of the 41-D crew that the system failed badly and that the student experiment program needs to be critically assessed The Float Zone Crystal Growth Experiment should have been properly manifested as a middeck experiment and therefore, could have received the proper amount of preflight and inflight attention. No doubt it will reappear as such on some subsequent flight EARTH OBSERVATION The SPOC is an extremely useful aid to earth observation. However, it would be even more so if it had an automated alert tone capability that would warn the crew several minuted in advance of a target of opportunity. As it was, lacking this type of alert, crewmembers missed several targets because they were engrossed in other tasks (which could have been interrupted). There was some crew confusion on the f-stop readings being given by SPOC. The target f-stop would not always agree with the continually updated nadir f-stop, and both of these sometimes disagree with the MET log f-stop. In most cases these disagreements would be +-1/2 stop, but occasionally +-1 stop differences were seen. These differences have since been adequately explained to the crew and no SPOC changes are recommended. However, earth observation should emphasize how each f-stop is computed and which to use when they differ. Teleprinted daily earth observation updates were felt to enhance greatly effectiveness of earth observation. The crew highly recommends that these updates continue to be part of the daily teleprinter message. A future update to the SPOC software that would allow a real-time entry targets into the SPOC target list would be a significant enhancement to earth observation and us recommended
Transcription Notes:
the (+-) is supposed to be a plus sign on top of a minus sign in "In most cases these disagreements would be +-1/2 stop, but occasionally +-1 stop differences were seen."
