posted 07-11-2011 10:49 PM               

It was done and in fact another thing the team accomplished in a very short period of time. We kind of pulled that on them a little late in the game, of making that request, but in their usual fashion, they did an outstanding job in terms of being able to configure the system before we flew to allow us to do that.

And what we're talking about is the feedline camera that we normally have video from during the uphill ascent into orbit phase. And then so we don't transmit over parts of the world that don't normally want us to have those kind of RF signals transmitted, we turn it off.

In this case, we asked if we could leave it on longer so that we'd be able to see the reentry of the external tank. The teams were able to reconfigure the systems to be able to do that.

Our network team... really just went beyond the call in terms of being able to provide some capability on the ground with a station at Diego Garcia that could receive this information.

As it turns out, the results I think are going to be about what we expected, which is when the tank gets to this point in its entry and reentry into the atmosphere, it's tumbling by this time. And so the lighting is somewhat questionable, which again would be expected.

So, the information that I have is that we have captured the data from Diego Garcia. It is going to be questionable in terms of usefulness given the motion of the tank and lighting, but we haven't had any experts been able to look at it yet and we won't have that unfortunately for probably a couple of weeks.

And so that's not something we'll likely see during the mission. It's possible, but it's just not likely that we'll see that by the time we finish this mission. But it was a best effort to begin with and so we'll see what we see when we get the DVD, but that's the status of it as it stands today.