Retired Canadian Space Agency astronaut Marc Garneau describes the time he picked up a spinning satellite in space known as Spartan 207. Garneau retrieved the satellite in May 1996 during space shuttle mission STS-77, using the Canadarm. Garneau was speaking to Space.com on the 40th anniversary of his first spaceflight, also Canada's first, in 1984.
Credit: Space.com | NASA | edited by Steve Spaleta
Credit: Space.com | NASA | edited by Steve Spaleta
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00And if I had to single out one single moment that gave me the greatest pride in my three
00:10missions, it was on the second mission when I had to capture a free-flying spacecraft
00:16called Spartan 207, which we had released a couple of days before and which we had to
00:23now recover and bring back to Earth.
00:29Endeavor, Houston, for Spartan.
00:31Go ahead.
00:34Yeah, at this point, what we'd like to do real quickly is see if we can get a view of
00:42the top of the Spartan and then go ahead and proceed with the birth and RMS power down.
00:48Okay, and that's exactly where we were going, Bill.
00:53Locating it now.
00:55Thanks, John.
00:59We got a good downlink.
01:01Affirmative.
01:03And this is really when you're, it's when the rubber hits the road, you have to capture
01:11it.
01:12And it's different from, you know, capturing a payload that's in the payload bay that's
01:18fixed.
01:19If you aren't successful, the payload you're trying to grab is not going to go anywhere.
01:26If you make a mistake trying to grab a free-flying satellite, and remember, you and the orbiter
01:32are both moving around the Earth in tandem at 28,000 kilometers per hour.
01:37But if you do it wrongly, there's the potential for you to cause unwanted motion in your spacecraft.
01:44And then it's an extremely challenging task to be able to recover it after that.
01:49So I felt that was the moment when I really had to be successful.
01:55And it's the moment it worked out and it gave me a huge amount of pride, being a Canadian,
02:02to operate that Canadarm and to capture a free-flying payload.