Endeavour Begins Chase After Satellite

The space shuttle Endeavour Thursday began an orbital chase of a large Japanese satellite that it is to capture and bring back to Earth as the highlight of an ambitious nine-day mission.

Endeavour and its crew of six astronauts began the hunt before dawn when the shuttle lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 4:41 a.m. The launching was delayed for about 20 minutes while technicians sorted out ground communication problems.

It was 10 years ago this month, on Jan. 28, 1986, in 36-degree cold, that the space shuttle Challenger exploded after liftoff, killing all seven crew members. It was later determined that seals on the booster rockets had been affected by the cold. The temperature Thursday, 44 degrees, was the coldest since that launch.

Endeavour is to close in on the Japanese satellite, a 7,000-pound, reusable experiment platform called the Space Flyer Unit, on Saturday. A Japanese astronaut on board the shuttle, Koichi Wakata, is to use Endeavour’s 50-foot robot arm to snare the satellite and secure it in the shuttle’s cargo bay. The satellite, launched last March aboard a Japanese Space Agency H-2 rocket, was designed to be retrieved by an American shuttle.

Japan will pay NASA about $50 million for recovering the satellite, which contains 11 scientific payloads, including crystal-growth furnaces and an infrared telescope.

Also on board, in an experiment to see how weightlessness affects spawning, are two red-bellied newts, now dead, and their fertilized eggs.