NASA BRIEFINGS SET FOR ORFEUS-SPAS, WAKE SHIELD MISSION

Wed, 23 Oct 1996 15:45:49 -0400
Source: NASA HQ Public Affairs Office
(WUFOC NOTE: This even has already been, but maybe there will be repeated transmissions)

Ed Campion
Headquarters, Washington, DC October 23, 1996
(Phone: 202/358-1778)

Rob Navias
Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX
(Phone: 713/483-5111)

NOTE TO EDITORS: N96-69

BRIEFINGS SET FOR ORFEUS-SPAS, WAKE SHIELD MISSION

A series of briefings on the STS-80 mission will be held on Thursday, Oct. 31, at the Johnson Space Center (JSC), Houston, TX, the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), FL, and the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, MD. All the briefings will be broadcast on NASA Television.

The seventh and final Shuttle flight of the year is scheduled to be launched in early November aboard Columbia with five astronauts aboard to deploy and retrieve a pair of science satellites -- the ORFEUS-SPAS astronomy satellite, and the Wake Shield Facility, making its third flight to grow thin film semiconductor material in a nearly perfect vacuum in orbit.

In addition, astronauts Tammy Jernigan and Tom Jones will conduct a pair of spacewalks during the planned 16-day mission designed to fine-tune techniques which will be used in the assembly of the International Space Station beginning in December 1997.

The briefings will begin at 9 a.m. EST at JSC with an overview of the mission by STS-80 Lead Flight Director Al Pennington, followed at 10 a.m. EST with the ORFEUS-SPAS briefing from KSC. At 11 a.m. EST the briefings return to JSC for an overview on the Wake Shield Facility. The briefings will resume at 1 p.m. EST with a briefing from JSC on the two spacewalks which will be performed during the flight, followed at 2:30 p.m. EST by the STS-80 crew news conference. At 4 p.m. EST a briefing will be conducted at JSC on the National Institutes of Health-R experiment. The briefings will conclude at 4:30 p.m. EST with a briefing on the Space Experiment Module from Goddard.

Individual round-robin interviews with the STS-80 astronauts will be held after the crew news conference for reporters attending the briefings at JSC and those who make special arrangements to conduct interviews by phone. Reporters interested in round-robin interviews with the STS-80 astronauts should contact Eileen Hawley at 713/483-5111 by close of business on October 28. The interviews will not be seen on NASA TV.

The STS-80 briefings can be seen on NASA Television, which is carried on Spacenet 2, Transponder 5, Channel 9 at 69 degrees West longitude, horizontal polarization, frequency 3880 Mhz, audio 6.8 Mhz.

STS-80 Briefings (all times are EST)

9 a.m. Mission Overview (JSC) Al Pennington, STS-80 Lead Flight Director

10 a.m. ORFEUS-SPAS Overview (KSC) Konrad Moritz, ORFEUS-SPAS Project Manager Ron Polidan, ORFEUS-SPAS Project Scientist

11 a.m. Wake Shield Facility Overview (JSC) Ed Gabris, Director, Space Development and Commercial Research Division, NASA Headquarters Dr. Alex Ignatiev, Director, Space Vacuum and Epitaxy Center, University of Houston

1:00 p.m. EVA Overview (JSC) Daryl Schuck, STS-80 Lead EVA Officer Tim Brady, EVA Development Test Flight Hardware Manager

2:30 p.m. STS-80 Crew News Conference (JSC) Ken Cockrell, Commander Kent Rominger, Pilot Tammy Jernigan, Mission Specialist 1 Tom Jones, Mission Specialist 2 Story Musgrave, Mission Specialist 3

4:00 p.m. NIH-R Experiment Overview (JSC) David McCarron, Principal Investigator, Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland

4:30 p.m. Space Experiment Module Overview (GSFC) Ruthan Lewis, SEM Mission Manager

-end-

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