Fifteen years ago today — February 22, 1996 — the Space Shuttle Columbia launched from Kennedy Space Center on another attempt to study the behavior of tethers in space.
(Tethered Satellite System being extended from its cradle aboard STS-75. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)
STS-75 carried the Tethered Satellite System Reflight (TSS-1R) — “reflight” because the tether jammed on its first flight (STS-46 in June 1992), demonstrating that even the simplest of ideas turn out to be not so simple in space. U.S. astronauts Andrew M. Allen, Scott J. Horowitz, Franklin R. Chang-Diaz, and Jeffrey A. Hoffman, along with Claude Nicollier of Switzerland, and Maurizio Cheli and Umberto Guidoni of Italy, deployed the TSS-1R’s conducting tether and monitored its performance … right up until the tether broke “just short of full deployment of about 12.8 miles (20.6 kilometers).”
The crew also conducted materials science and condensed matter physics experiments using the United States Microgravity Payload (USMP-3), but that’s not where the UFOs come in.
The UFO controversy surrounding STS-75 concerns images that appear in video of the TSS experiments. UFO enthusiasts content that the bright disk shapes may be alien spacecraft, but NASA maintains that they are simply out-of-focus dust particles and similar phenomena. If you’re interested, you can read about the issue on this page and in this discussion thread, or you can watch one of several online videos.
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