UFO Encounter and Orbiter Docking

After the next sunrise, here's a joke getting ready to go out with the M.M.U. We have a sequence of footage now that are drawn from both the EVAs in her spurs. We won't distinguish between the two, but give it try to give you a flavor for what it was like. The Rick says, right at sunrise, we went out. Dales actually flying out here with Rick recording most of this on all sorts of the film. About this time I thought that he should think twice about it, but they'll go ahead and describe. Yeah, Joe had done this on Flight D5 and proven that the M.M.U. in the Stinger concept for captioning a satellite worked and worked perfectly. And I essentially had just a lot of fun on Flight D7, no on Flight D7, no all worked. There was to go to the big load off my mind. Because I flew out a little bit differently than Joe had. You might remember Joe commenting that the sun had bothered him. It was in his eyes during the last phase. And you'll see here in a minute that when the sun finally does come up, I was fortunate enough to use the orbiter's nose to shadow the sun. So my approach to the satellite, and you can see that the shadow of the nose of the orbiter now is on the surface. The orbiter now is on the satellite and on me. And so my docking was a little bit easier with that information that Joe had given me from the earlier EVA. M.M.U. is performed flawlessly as you heard us talk about from space. And this method of capturing the satellite certainly worked well. You can see the arm in the lower right corner of the picture, which was a position that Anna had put it into a system, and the station keeping test. Notice that the people who brought that satellite to us left it in absolutely perfect position with regard to its rotation and lack of mutation, which we appreciate it. We can't emphasize that enough. The satellite originally was rotating 50 revolutions per minute, but was slowed down by ground controllers. Very painstakingly over many, many weeks time, position and slowed down. And in the slowing, they left it still turning at a very, very regular rate. So it made our job absolutely easy as part. Once docked, the procedure then was to use the M.M.U. to stop the rotation, which was equally easy. You can see it's now quite stable. And the M.M.U. pilot could then maneuver the satellite, turn it, wherever we wanted it, in such a way that Anna could grab the grapple fixture. This is sequence from the first Ronnie Boot. It worked just like it did in the simulator, getting Joe commands to maneuver such that I could see the end effector, the grapple target, and it went very well, very smoothly.