LSRPictures - Mulher no Comando

De Cabo Canaveral (EUA)

O ônibus espacial Columbia foi lançado na madrugada de sexta levando a bordo cinco astronautas, entre eles Eileen Collins, a primeira mulher a comandar uma missão espacial norte-americana.

Collins, 42, é coronel da Força Aérea dos EUA e ex-piloto de provas. Ela realiza seu terceiro vôo espacial. Anteriormente, foi co-piloto do Columbia.

A nave transporta o observatório Chandra, o telescópio de raios X mais poderoso do mundo. O aparelho de 15 metros, pesando 25 toneladas, custou US$ 1,5 bilhão. O Chandra passará cinco anos buscando buracos negros e estudando galáxias.

Os cientistas acreditam que conhecer a matéria negra no espaço ajuda a entender o universo e a determinar as distâncias entre os corpos celestes.

O Columbia deveria ter sido lançado em duas ocasiões. No dia 20 de julho -trinta anos depois do vôo da Apolo 11 com destino à Lua- o ônibus espacial teve seu lançamento cancelado por causa do registro errôneo de grande quantidade de hidrogênio na sala de máquinas. Na quinta, a contagem regressiva foi interrompida por causa das fortes chuvas que atingiram Cabo Canaveral, localizado no Estado da Flórida.

© Brasil On Line

Shuttle releases heaviest payload ever

Chandra telescope achieves proper orbit

July 23, 1999
Web posted at: 10:08 a.m. EDT (1408 GMT)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (CNN) -- Overcoming numerous liftoff difficulties Friday morning, the first U.S. space mission commanded by a woman successfully released the Chandra telescope, the heaviest payload ever carried by a space shuttle.

As Columbia cruised over Indonesia, the shuttle team tilted, powered up, unplugged and released, or deployed, the 50,000 pound (22,680 kilogram) X-ray observatory into space a little before 8 a.m. EDT.

"Houston, we have a good deploy," said shuttle commander Eileen Collins. "Chandra is ready to open the eyes of X-ray astronomy to the world."

The $1.5 billion telescope will focus on black holes, exploding stars and colliding galaxies, giving astronomers insights into the origins of the universe.

After the telescope's spring-loaded release, Collins and her crew backed the shuttle away from the telescope. About an hour later, booster rockets on Chandra fired to push the telescope into its orbit. A mission operator later told the crew that the telescope was in its proper orbit.

"There are five big smiles in here," said mission specialist Cady Coleman as other crewmembers could be heard cheering in the background. Coleman oversaw Chandra's deployment.

Crewmembers filmed the silver, blue and gold telescope as it drifted away, and those images were replayed on NASA-TV.

"There is nothing as beautiful as Chandra sailing off on its way to work," Coleman said. "We were almost too excited to video."

Thrusters to be fired in the coming days will push Chandra into a highly elliptical oval orbit, taking it one-third of the way to the moon and outside the Van Allen radiation belt, which could interfere with observations during its five-year mission.

Later Friday morning, mission operators at the Chandra Control Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sent commands for the telescope from its booster rockets.

First female commander handles shaky start

The Columbia, with commander Eileen Collins at the helm, roared into orbit at 12:31 a.m. Friday after a far from perfect launch. Several technical glitches plagued Columbia during its eight-minute climb to outer space.

NASA said the problems started at liftoff when Collins noticed a malfunction in the electrical power flowing to the shuttle's engines, said Donald McMonagle, a shuttle program manager for the space agency.

A short circuit lasting about a second knocked out computers that controlled two of the shuttle's three engines. Backup computers kept the engines working, and the loss of power should have no impact on the mission, NASA said.

More troublesome was that Columbia ran short of liquid oxygen fuel -- about 4,000 pounds short. That caused the shuttle's engines to shut off "less than three or four seconds" sooner than planned, McMonagle said.

"The cause is not known," he said, but a review would look at how the fuel was loaded and whether mission managers' calculations were in error.

"Keep in mind that's 4,000 pounds out of about 1.2 million pounds carried in the shuttle's massive external fuel tank," McMonagle said. But Columbia was left in an orbit seven miles lower than intended, a difference that can be made up using fuel carried aboard the orbiter itself.

Launch controllers said they weren't sure why they had less liquid oxygen than needed, but as it turns out, the high point of Columbia's oval orbit (153 nautical miles) was good enough for deployment of the Chandra.

'It's great to be back in zero-g'

After NASA halted two earlier launch attempts late in the countdown -- Tuesday because of a technical glitch and Thursday because of lightning -- Collins expressed relief to finally be in space.

"It's great to be back in zero-g again," said the 42-year-old Collins, who flew twice before as a shuttle co-pilot. As for the liftoff problems, the commander calmly said, "A few things to work on ascent kept it interesting."

Among those who were on hand for the launch was Lalitha Chandrasekhar, the 88-year-old widow of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the Indian-born astrophysicist known to friends and colleagues simply as Chandra, for whom the telescope was named.

Chandrasekhar was the scientist who predicted an upper limit to the mass of stars, above which they either explode or form black holes -- points in space so massive that light, energy and matter seem to disappear into them.

Columbia is scheduled to land at the Kennedy Space Center Tuesday.

Correspondent Miles O'Brien and Reuters contributed to this report.