STS-94 Mission Science Report # 7s Friday, July 4, 1997 8 a.m.
CDT Through the evening and into the morning on Friday, Space
Shuttle crew members and ground controllers worked together to
complete a variety of experiments and resolve some of the
challenges associated with keeping a complex science payload up
and running. The Microgravity Science Laboratory consists of
more than 30 experiments in the primary areas of combustion,
biotechnology, materials science and fluid physics. “Great
teamwork by the orbiter crew and science teams on the ground has
worked around some anomalies enabling us to collect very
valuable science data,” said Dr. Patton Downey, assistant
mission scientist. Aboard Columbia, runs of the Droplet
Combustion Experiment were slightly delayed while
troubleshooting teams investigated a suspected correlation
between three brief malfunctions of the computer which oversees
all the experiments aboard Spacelab. Within minutes of each
malfunction, the crew was able to reboot the computer with no im