Fifteen years ago today — August 7, 1997 — the Space Shuttle Discovery launched from the Kennedy Space Center on a mission to study the Earth’s atomosphere from space.
(Discovery‘s payload bay, outfitted with experimental packages for STS-85. NASA image.)
Astronauts Curtis L. Brown, Jr., Kent V. Rominger, N. Jan Davis, Robert L. Curbeam, Jr., Stephen K. Robinson, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Bjarni Y.Tryggvason made up the crew of mission STS-85. Their mission was the second to carry the Cryogenic Infrared Spectrometers and Telescopes for the Atmosphere, Shuttle Pallet Satellite (with the unwieldy acronym CRISTA-SPAS) as part of the “Mission to Planet Earth.” They deployed the pallet shortly after reaching orbit, and retrieved it on August 16th.
STS-85 also carried the Japanese Manipulator Flight Development (MFD) system; two “hitchhiker” payloads, Technology Applications and Science-01 (TAS-1) and the International Extreme Ultraviolet Hitchhiker-02 (IEH-02), and a variety of smaller experiment packages in the main cabin. The crew “also worked with the Orbiter Space Vision System (OSVS), which [was] used during ISS assembly.” They returned to Earth on August 19th.
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