BY TIM BONFIELD
The Cincinnati Enquirer
As the space shuttle Discovery spends today winding up its many science experiments, Annie Glenn is getting ready to welcome her husband back to Earth ‹ with a whole pack of chewing gum.
Back in 1962, just before he blasted off as the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn told his wife over the radio that he was ŒŒjust going down to the corner to get chewing gum.¹¹
Just before last week's shuttle launch, Mr. Glenn gave his wife a pack of gum. The whole Glenn family will chew the
pieces once the world's oldest space traveler lands Saturday.
"That was the last thing he handed me. That was the last thing," Mrs. Glenn said at a Thursday press conference. "It has memories of every time he would go overseas into combat, on his last launching a long time ago, and then this."
"I didn't know he was going
to give it to me, so it was a really, very touching moment," she said. "I can hardly wait to chew it."
NASA officials said all the experiments on Discovery's nine-day mission will be "powered down" tonight, except a space furnace test that will run overnight. STS-95 has been one of very few shuttle missions to run entirely on-schedule.
Mr. Glenn and crewmate Pedro Duque will give their last blood samples for their muscle-loss experiment this morning. Thursday night, Mr. Glenn and crewmate Chiaki Mukai spent their last of four nights wearing the head-net of monitors for the
sleep-disorders experiment.
Meanwhile, the astronomy experiments aboard Discovery have been going well.
The International Extreme Ultraviolet Hitchhiker payload carried several experiments, ranging from a PANSAT communications satellite to be used to train U.S. Navy graduate students to an ultraviolet telescope to study the chemical composition of Jupiter.
The Hitchhiker mission also took ultraviolet observations of the sun, the Earth's atmosphere and distant "diffuse" targets such as supernova remnants, nebulae, and star-forming regions of galaxies outside the
Milky Way.
Of the extremely few glitches in the mission, the Hitchhiker's STAR-LITE device obtained only some of its sought-after images, because its vertical motion control got stuck. The horizontal controls worked fine.
In a crew news conference, Mr. Glenn acknowledged he misses his wife and family but wouldn't mind another week in orbit.
He won't get it. And if his family has anything to say about it, come Saturday, Mr. Glenn will be back on planet Earth to stay.
