STS 58

Description

STS 58 was the 15 flight of the orbiter Columbia. The primary payload for this mission was the second flight of the Spacelab Life Sciences (SLS 2) cargo bay payload. In addition to activities involved with the SLS 2 payload, seven experiments providing additional information for on-going medical studies supporting the Extended Duration Orbiter (EDO) Medical Project were performed. The EDO Medical Project is designed to assess the impact of long duration spaceflight (>10 days) on astronaut health, identify any operational medical concerns, and test countermeasures for the adverse effects of weightlessness on human physiology. Only three of the EDO experiments took place in-flight; the other four occurred prior and/or subsequent to the mission. An additional experiment performed on this flight was the Orbital Acceleration Research Experiment, or OARE. The main goal of the experiment was to measure the Shuttle's aeordynamic forces (drag) in orbit and during the early stages of re-entry. This was the third flight of this experiment. Astronauts also participated in the eleventh flight of the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment (SAREX).