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 SSEL's MISSE-6 Experiments safely stowed in Discovery Shuttle Bay after last night's EVA
Last evening, during the first EVA of mission STS-128, "space walkers" Danny Olivas and Nicole Stott spent 6 1/2 hours working outside the station. One of their tasks was to remove the MISSE-6 Payload Experiment Carriers, two suitcase-sized boxes that contain, among others, experiments designed and built here by an SSEL student team during 2004 - 2007. The carriers were successfully removed from ISS and stowed in the currently-docked STS Discovery payload bay.
Since being bolted on to the outside the Space station and powered up by space-walking astronauts on STS-123 on March 22, 2008, the two SSEL instruments have been (hopefully) working away, methodically recording their data, silently, onboard. Once back on terra firma when Discovery completes its mission the experiment carriers will be transported by NASA to the Langley Research Center. SSEL personnel (students) will meet the experiments in a Langley clean room, download the data, and deintegrate the two packages to be hand carried back to MSU for detailed analysis.
My sincere thanks to you, the students, who worked on the SSEL MISSE experiments during those years -- most of you have finished your studies and are now employed around the country. Other students will pick up where you left off, by analyzing the data, and conducting further experiments (e.g. in the laboratory) on the hardware.
My thanks also goes to Montana Space Grant Consortium for partial sponsorship of the past and of the future MISSE activities. Thanks also to Tethers Unlimited for supplying several test articles for our materials experiment.
Go MISSE !!!!
Regards, Dave Klumpar
Date Posted:
September 4, 2009
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