STS-41-G Totally Explained

Everything about Sts-41-g totally explained

STS 41-G marked the 13th flight of a space shuttle and the sixth flight of Challenger. It conducted the second landing at Kennedy Space Center. It was the first shuttle mission to carry seven crewmembers, and the first shuttle mission to have the IMAX camera on board to document the flight. Film from the mission (including Sullivan and Leestma's EVA) appeared in the IMAX movie The Dream is Alive.

Crew

Number in parentheses indicates number of spaceflights by each individual prior to and including this mission.

Robert L. Crippen (4) - Commander
Jon A. McBride (1) - Pilot
Kathryn D. Sullivan (1) - Mission Specialist
Sally K. Ride (2) - Mission Specialist
David C. Leestma (1) - Mission Specialist
Marc Garneau (1) - Payload Specialist -
Paul D. Scully-Power (1) - Payload Specialist

Backup crew

Robert Stevenson - Payload Specialist

Robert Thirsk - Payload Specialist -

Mission parameters

Mass:

Orbiter Liftoff: 110,127 kg
Orbiter Landing: 91,744 kg
Payload: 10,643 kg

Perigee: 350 km

Apogee: 390 km

Inclination: 51.7°

Period: 92.0 min

Space walk

Leestma and Sullivan - EVA 1

EVA 1 Start: October 11, 1984

EVA 1 End: October 11, 1984

Duration: 3 hours, 29 minutes

Mission highlights

On October 5, 1984, Challenger returned to flight with its launch at 7:03 a.m. EDT, marking the start of the STS 41-G mission. It was Challenger's sixth mission and the 13th liftoff in the Space Shuttle program.
   On board were seven crew members -- the largest flight crew ever to fly on a single spacecraft at that time. They included commander Robert L. Crippen, making his fourth Shuttle flight and second in six months; pilot Jon A. McBride; three mission specialists -- David C. Leestma, Sally K. Ride and Kathryn D. Sullivan -- (the first time two female astronauts had flown together); and two payload specialists, Paul Scully-Power and Marc Garneau, the first Canadian citizen to serve as a Shuttle crew member, as well as the first Canadian in space.
   Astronaut Sullivan became the second woman to walk in space when she and David C. Leestma performed a 3 hour EVA on Oct. ll demonstrating the Orbital Refueling System (ORS) and proving the feasibility of refueling satellites in orbit.
   Nine hours after liftoff, the 5,087 lb (2307 kg), Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) was deployed from the payload bay by the RMS arm, and its on-board thrusters boosted it into an orbit 350 miles (563 km) above the Earth. ERBS was the first of three planned satellites designed to measure the amount of energy received from the sun and reradiated into space. It also studied the seasonal movement of energy from the tropics to the polar regions.
   Another major mission activity, operation of the Shuttle Imaging Radar-B (SIR-B) was conducted. SIR-B was part of the OSTA-3 experiment package in the payload bay, which also included the Large Format Camera (LFC) to photograph Earth, another camera called MAPS which measured air pollution, and a feature identification and location experiment called FILE which consisted of two TV cameras and two 70 mm still cameras.
   The SIR-B effort was an improved version of a similar device flown on the OSTA-l package during STS-2. It had an eight-panel antenna array measuring 35 by 7 feet (11 by 2 m). It operated throughout the flight but problems were encountered with Challenger’s K_u band antenna and therefore much of the data had to be recorded on board the orbiter rather than transmitted to Earth in real-time as originally planned.
   Payload Specialist Scully-Powers, an employee of the US Naval Research Lab, performed a series of oceanography observations during the mission. Garneau conducted experiments sponsored by the Canadian government, called CANEX, which were related to medical, atmospheric, climatic, materials and robotic sciences. A number of GAS canisters covering a wide variety of materials testing and physics were also flown.
   The Soviet Terra-3 laser testing centre was used to track Challenger with a low power laser on 10 October 1984. This caused malfunction of on-board equipment and temporary blinding of the crew, leading to a US diplomatic protest.
   STS 41-G was an 8 day, 5 hour, 23 minute, 33 second mission which traveled 4.3 million miles (6,900,000 km) and completed 132 orbits. It landed at the Shuttle Landing Facility at KSC -- the second Shuttle landing there -- on October 13, at 12:26 p.m. EDT.

Mission insignia

The thirteen complete stars in the blue field of the US flag of the mission insignia symbolize the flight's numerical designation in the Space Transportation System's mission sequence. Also, the Canadian flag represents the nationality of astronaut Marc Garneau.

Further Information

Get more info on 'Sts-41-g'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://sts-41-g.totallyexplained.com">STS-41-G Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.