Word: palletized
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...jets. The space walkers also retrieved a faulty camera from the aft end of the cargo bay, engaged in a brief and successful tryout of the shuttle's sinewy, 50-ft.-long arm, readjusted a scientific instrument on the big West German-made movable platform called the Shuttle Pallet Satellite (SPAS) and tested some of the tools created for April's satellite retrieval...
...high school student to see if zero-g can relieve the agony of arthritic rats in a mid-deck cage. The astronauts will operate the shuttle's sinewy remote-controlled arm, using it to lift out into space a German-built platform known as SPAS (for Shuttle Pallet Satellite), which is loaded with scientific instruments. More significant, they are slated for a two-day game of tag with a 6½-ft.-diameter Mylar balloon. As the sphere drifts as far as 120 miles away, the crew will use radar and optical tracking to find their way back...
This chaotic beginning last week seemed to set the tone for the debut flight of the European-built Spacelab 1. Following an almost unblemished Florida launch, the astronauts quickly started to activate the 72 experiments both inside the 23-ft.-long module and on its external pallet, where some instruments are exposed directly to space. They also commenced tests on the most complex machinery aboard the shuttle: themselves. But even though this long-awaited venture in international cooperation appeared headed toward a major success, it was accompanied by annoying glitches that turned the mission into as much a test...
...capable of sending only a fraction of its ground-to-orbit capacity. These difficulties were compounded by the brief blackout of a tracking station in White Sands, N. Mex., and the failure of an electronic relay on the shuttle. The device was supposed to collect data from the pallet experiments and pipe them into Spacelab's computers...
Despite the rash of mishaps and irritations, the scientist-astronauts seemed pleased with the gleaming celestial laboratory. Said Lichtenberg, a biomedical engineer from M.I.T.: "It's just an amazing vehicle. Spacelab lives up to all its expectations." In one experiment involving a pallet instrument called a spectrophotometer, the scientists succeeded in making the first measurements of deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen, in the upper atmosphere. By such observations, scientists can study weather patterns on earth. They can also explore the history of distant worlds, since the presence of large quantities of deuterium is a sign that a planet...