MISSION CONTROL CENTER
STS-63 Status Report #14


Thursday, February 9, 1995, 6:30 a.m. CST

Discovery's crew performed the second rendezvous of the mission today and are now in  
the midst of a spacewalk in one of the busiest days ever aboard a Space Shuttle.

Commander Jim Wetherbee and Pilot Eileen Collins flawlessly eased the shuttle to the  
Spartan satellite this morning, which had been released from Discovery on Tuesday, to  
allow astronaut Janice Voss to capture it using the mechanical arm. Voss locked on to the  
satellite and its cargo of research on the material in interstellar space at 5:33 a.m. CST as  
Discovery flew 240 miles above the Pacific Ocean south of the Aleutian Islands.

While free-flying from Discovery, Spartan's Far Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph  
gathered more than 40 hours of observations to study the interstellar medium, the gas and  
dust that fills space between stars and planets and of which new such bodies are formed.

Just after the satellite was captured, crewmates Mike Foale and Bernard Harris began a  
five-hour spacewalk to test new thermal devices designed to warm their spacesuits and  
evaluate how well they can manipulate the 3,000-pound Spartan satellite in  
weightlessness. Harris became the first African-American to walk in space as the EVA  
started at 5:56 a.m. CST.

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