Mar 17 1982
From The Space Library
March 17-30: NASA began the countdown for the third test flight of Space Shuttle orbiter Columbia scheduled for launch March 22, although runways at Edwards Air Force Base in California were too rainsoaked to permit an emergency landing. STS-3 would use a runway at White Sands, N.M., for landing. Marine Corps Col. Jack Lousma and U.S. Air Force Col. Charles Gordon Fullerton had frequently practiced landing jet aircraft at White Sands, where the two gypsum-based desert runways were as wide and almost as long as the seven mile-long runway at Edwards. They had also practiced landing on a three-mile-long concrete runway at KSC, to be used only in case of losing an engine during the first four minutes of flight from that location.
Heavy rains all day March 17 left more than an inch of water on the "dry" lake beds at Edwards, where Columbia had landed after its first two flights. NASA said that it was cheaper to move landing equipment to White Sands than to postpone the flight until Edwards dried out: each day of delay in launching the Shuttle cost the agency $3 million. A special landing team immediately began loading support equipment on a 23-car train that would carry it the 1,000 miles from Edwards to White Sands. The equipment should be in place late on Sunday, March 21, ready for use should an emergency occur after liftoff.
The upcoming flight, third of a series of four test flights before the Shuttle began carrying payloads into space later in 1982, would subject the spacecraft to temperature extremes to see how it endured long exposure to dark and light. It would also include further tests of the 50-foot robot arm designed to handle Shuttle payloads. Exposure of the Shuttle tail would test pumping of fuel and restarting rear engines under extremely high or low temperatures.
Exposure of the 65-foot-long cargo bay carrying more than 21,000 pounds of instruments and experiments to the extreme heat encountered in space would show how materials carried into space over the next 10 years would survive. The open cargo bay aimed at the Sun would also seek exposure to solar flares, for which scientists were still seeking explanations.
Lousma and Fullerton flew from JSC at Houston to Patrick Air Force Base, Fla., near KSC in T-38 jet trainers Saturday, March 20, and planned to spend most of Sunday in preflight briefings. KSC said that the countdown had been virtually trouble-free and ahead of schedule.
Liftoff from pad A, Launch Complex 39, took place Monday, March 22, at 10:59 a.m:: EST after an hour's delay caused by failure of a protection circuit in the controller for. the heated nitrogen purge of the main engines, required before introduction of cryogenic fuel. Countdown stopped for reestablishment of heater control. Initial orbit elements were 240-kilometer apogee and perigee, 89-minute period, and °38 ° inclination. Operations began in the fourth hours of flight with the opening of payload doors, removal of ejection suits, and activation of the Office of Space Sciences experiment package (OSS-1). Later reports indicated that the crew suffered from motion sickness after the exertion of removing the space suits; incidence of motion sickness had been less on Mercury and Gemini when astronauts had less area to move in, and-both Soviet and U.S. crews had taken time on longer flights to get used to weightlessness before active exertion.
Scheduled for the second day was deployment of the robot arm; for the third was practice in grappling payload packages and extending a set of sensors over the edges of the cargo bay to measure plasma (electrically charged gases) in Earth orbit. The fourth and fifth days would see further tests of the arm, more thermal testing, and two brief ignitions of the maneuvering rockets to see how they performed after long periods of cold. The sixth day would have more thermal tests and experiments on solar radiation; the seventh day would be for shutdown and landing preparations.
All activities planned for day one were accomplished; OSS-1 experimenters reported "excellent data." Thermal attitude tail-to-sun prevailed throughout the sleep period. A survey with the remote manipulator system (RMS) camera showed several low-temperature white tiles missing or damaged on the nosecone. Also, three pieces of black tiles (about 1 1/2 tiles) had been found 700 feet south of the launch pad; others had been found on and near the beach. All had been sent to JSC for identification and analysis.
On Tuesday, the first day in orbit, the "wrist" camera on the manipulator arm went dark, and flight directors postponed the critical grappling test to devise a way to do the test without it. That camera served as the crew's eyes whenever the end of the arm took hold of an object in the cargo bay. Planned use was to raise an 82-pound package and move it around the bay; the instrument inside would measure electrical disturbances caused by the spacecraft and its motion through the electronically charged ionosphere. Instead, the crew extended the robot arm far over the cargo bay and used the "elbow" camera to transmit "the best television ever seen of the earth" from 150 miles up.
The crew turned on the monodisperse latex reactor [see January 19] for 14 hours; the solution would be stirred every 30 minutes for the rest of the mission. Ground control changed the activity schedule to allow for crew rest and troubleshooting; day four activities would be done on day three and vice versa, a prelaunch-planned option. Problems were reported with the environmental control and life-support systems and with the waste-control "slinger"; NASA said it had initiated "backup procedures" Besides suffering from motion sickness, Lousma had been kept awake by loud radio static, probably from a Soviet radar at Rostov on the Black Sea, said to be the most powerful in the world; it was called Woodpecker by radio ham operators because of its noise, heard from Spain to parts of China.
STS-3 lost three main radio links to Earth Friday, March 25, through the Shuttle's transponders that locked on and amplified ground signals and carried nearly all data on Shuttle condition and its speed and location. Two ultra-high frequency (UHF) radio channels carried voice transmission, however, and the astronauts were using the remaining transponder, a backup UHF voice line, and the FM-radio line to relay information to Earth.
Gene Kranz, deputy flight director at JSC, said that the mission would go full time unless the high-power transponder link was lost. A premature end to the mission would require a landing somewhere other than at White Sands, because of bad weather with overcast skies and high winds that blew dust across the runways and created haze thick enough to obscure the landing site.
Two days away from the scheduled landing, the crew had completed all the thermal tests on Columbia: baking tail, nose, and top in unimpeded sunlight and chilling the same parts in the icy cold of space for hours. They had restarted the Shuttle engines hot and cold, opened and closed cargo-bay doors under both conditions, and repeatedly tested the mechanical arm under varying conditions with excellent results.
In the last possible opportunity, less than a day before the end of the mission, the crew pointed their solar telescope directly at the Sun and got a solar flare (an event on the Sun's surface they could not have predicted) "almost as if it were planned. " Dr. Robert Novick of Columbia University, where the X-ray polarimeter was built, said that this was the first time that an instrument in space with this sensitivity had witnessed a solar flare.
On Sunday night, March 28, the crew went to sleep two hours earlier than usual in preparation for landing Monday. About 40 minutes before the time scheduled for touchdown, astronaut John W. Young in a Grumman Gulfstream jet tried a practice landing on the White Sands runway and found visibility completely obscured. The Columbia crewmen were about to fire rockets to begin descent. "That's the first time I've seen it this bad," Young told mission control in Houston. "I think we ought to knock this thing off" Less than 15 minutes later, mission control ordered a day's delay. The two astronauts unpacked to await word from mission control on where and when they would return.
Landing finally occurred at 9:04 a.m. MST on Tuesday, March 30, on a dry lake bed at White Sands. Touchdown point was 1,092 feet past the runway threshold; rollout distance was 13,732 feet. The crew left the orbiter 45 minutes after landing, and postflight operations proceeded without incident. (NASA Release 82-29; NASA MOR M-989-82-03 [prelaunch] Mar 13/82, [postlaunch] May 5/82; NASA MOR E-835-03-82-01, OSS-l, [prelaunch] Mar 17/82, [postlaunch] Sept 20/82; Spacewarn SPX-341; NASA Dly Actv Rpt, Mar 24, 25, 29/82; NY Times, Mar 18/82, A-18; Mar 20, 7; Mar 21, 1; Mar 22, A-1; Mar 30, A-1; W Post, Mar 19/82, A-7; Mar 21, A-1; Mar 22, A-1; Mar 25, A-2; Mar 27, A-2; Mar 29, A-1; Mar 30, A-1)
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