get away special

STS-69

Get Away Special 

The California Student Get Away Special Payload GAS-450, recently went into orbit on the STS-57
Mission, Space Shuttle Endeavour, 21 June 1993, 6:14 Ah4 and landed on the 29 June 1993 at Kennedy
Space Center (KSC). Fifty students (Figure 1, Ages 7 to 18) from 13 California Central Coast Schools
and one in San Francisco designed and built 13 active experiments (6 modules) for this mission.
Preliminary analysis of our completely reusable payload bus system indicated that the structure, power
system, microprocessor and sensor systems in each experiment module worked flawlessly. The
experiments themselves performed exceptionally well with a 60 5% success ratio. The students are
thoroughly documenting their own experiments and results via a standard research paper guideline
generated by the GAS450 technical staff. If you would like to review any one or all of these papers (13)
please write to the SIL address above. Lessons learned (program management and technical) a=
documented at the end of the paper. If any other organization needs payload/experiment development or
NASA documentation assistance, then please contact us. We can help make your idea a space tested
reality. 

The payload structure mounted four Nikon F3 cameras (see below) each equipped with an 85mm lens. Two cameras were loaded with color film, one with positive (slide)film and one with negative (print) film. The other two cameras were loaded with high resolution black & white film and infrared black & white film . The exact combinations of film, filter and aperture were based on extensive testing done by the Can Do Technical team with the advice and consultation of the expert staff at the National Geographic Society in Washington DC.

STS-57

Science, art, shop, and music students took part in the five-year GAS project at Camden and Woodrow Wilson High Schools in Camden, New Jersey. Backed by their faculties and technical experts at RCA Corporation and Temple University, science students built an ant farm to learn if weightlessness would affect the colony's social structure. Behind the scenes, helpers from other classes fabricated the container housing, painted Orbit "81 murals, produced a GAS newsletter, and enacted plays for fund raisers. Although the colony perished aboard the Shuttle, learning did not stop after the flight. Biology students investigated the colony upon its return. They concluded that the ants died of dehydration when the GAS container was purged with dry air during preflight preparations. Even so, students rated their project a success: in their words, it "gave Camden students the opportunity to prove that they are as capable in the sciences as they are in sports.
There is another version of this patch also available.

Science, art, shop, and music students took part in the five-year GAS project at Camden and Woodrow Wilson High Schools in Camden, New Jersey. Backed by their faculties and technical experts at RCA Corporation and Temple University, science students built an ant farm to learn if weightlessness would affect the colony's social structure. Behind the scenes, helpers from other classes fabricated the container housing, painted Orbit "81 murals, produced a GAS newsletter, and enacted plays for fund raisers. Although the colony perished aboard the Shuttle, learning did not stop after the flight. Biology students investigated the colony upon its return. They concluded that the ants died of dehydration when the GAS container was purged with dry air during preflight preparations. Even so, students rated their project a success: in their words, it "gave Camden students the opportunity to prove that they are as capable in the sciences as they are in sports.
There is another version of this patch also available.

The OSTA-2 payload was the first in a series of planned orbital investigations of materials processing in space. The OSTA-2 comprised the Materials Experiments Assembly (MEA), developed and managed by the Marshall Center, and the Materialwissenschaftliche Autonome Experiments unter Schwerelosigkeit (MAUS), developed by the German Ministry for Research and Technology (BMFT). The MEA was a desk-size package carrying two experiment furnaces and an acoustic levitator; each was contained inside individual experiment containers. The experiments were vapor growth of alloy-type semiconductor crystals, liquid phase miscibility gap materials, and containerless processing of glass-forming melts. The MAUS consisted of three instruments; each was contained in a get-away-special (GAS) canister. Each cylindrical canister carried an experiment furnace, which was thermally insulated, and had its own service module. The MAUS experiments were two metallic dispersions and a solidification front.

SSC - Small-Self Contained Pauloads
SNSB - Swedish National School Board
It is possible this was a part of STS-108 but cancelled after STS-107.

Getaway Special was a NASA program that offered interested individuals, or groups, opportunities to fly small experiments aboard the Space Shuttle. The program, which was officially known as the Small, Self-Contained Payloads program, was canceled following the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster on February 1, 2003.
The Hitchhiker Program (HH) was a NASA program established in 1984 and administered by the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). The program was designed to allow low-cost and quick reactive experiments to be placed on board the Space Shuttle. The program was discontinued after the failure of STS-107.