The countdown for the launch of the shuttle Atlantis on its fourth docking mission with the Russian space station Mir finally got underway at midnight EDT (0400 GMT) Friday after six weeks of technical, scheduling, and weather delays, including a two-day delay earlier this month due to Hurricane Fran.
    Atlantis is set to lift off from Pad 39A at 4:54am EDT (0854 GMT) on Monday, September 16, at the beginning of a seven-minute launch window. The STS-79 mission has a crew of six veteran astronauts commanded by Bill Readdy.
    The mission was originally scheduled for launch on July 31, but the threat of possible landfall by Hurricane Bertha forced Atlantis to return to the safety of the VAB three weeks before launch. While there, shuttle managers decided to replace the solid rocket boosters when hot gases burned through a new adhesive in the boosters of a previous mission.
    The booster replacement delayed the launch to September 12, but a conflict with an Atlas launch on that date pushed the launch back two days. On September 4, with Hurricane Fran threatening the Florida coast, Atlantis again returned to the VAB, going back to the launch pad the next day as the hurricane veered north towards the Carolinas. The rollback pushed the launch date back two more days to September 16.
    NASA caught a break last week when a third hurricane, Hortense, stayed away from Florida. The powerful hurricane approached the Bahamas but then turned north away from land.
    The ten-day mission will feature the fourth docking between the shuttle and the ten-year-old Russian space station. Astronaut Shannon Lucid, who has spent nearly half a year on Mir, will return with the Atlantis crew at the end of the mission, while Atlantis crewmember John Blaha will take her place on Mir for a four-month stay.
    The shuttle is also bringing 2,100 kg (4,600 lbs.) of food, water, and other supplies to Mir, and will bring back 1,000 kg (2,200 lbs.) of Russian, European, and American scientific equipment and samples. A number of other experiments will be conducted during the mission.
    If launch takes place as scheduled, Atlantis will return to the Kennedy Space Center on the morning of September 26.

Astronaut Shannon Lucid broke the record for the longest stay in space by a woman when she marked 169 days -- and counting -- on the Russian space station Mir on September 7.
    Lucid broke the record held by Russian cosmonaut Elena Kondakova, who set the record last year on Mir. Lucid also holds the overall American endurance record, having broken Norman Thagard's year-old record two months ago.
    Lucid gained the opportunity to break the record when the shuttle Atlantis was grounded for six weeks in July due to problems with a new adhesive used in the shuttle's solid rocket boosters. Atlantis is now ready to fetch Lucid from Mir this week.
    Despite the extended stay, Lucid has remained in high spirits. "Not only have I had a good time from a personal level, but I think we have gained a lot of experience on how to deal with a long flight versus a short flight," she told NASA Administrator Dan Goldin in a phone interview.
    Kondakova, currently in Houston training for a shuttle mission next year, congratulated Lucid on breaking the record. "Life is easier on board because you don't have to do laundry there, you don't have to cook there," she commented. "So I think that, for a woman, being in space is kind of a vacation from home work."
    Should Lucid return with the shuttle as scheduled on September 26, she will have spent a total of 188 days in orbit.

The Galileo spacecraft made its second close flyby of Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, on September 6, passing a scant 262 km (162 miles) above its surface.
    Galileo passed over Ganymede's north polar regions during the flyby, taking images and other data on the solar system's largest moon. Scientists will combine this data with data fro m the first flyby in late June to learn more about Ganymede.
    Among the expected results from the flyby is a confirmation of a possible magnetic field around the moon. The first flyby detected evidence of a weak magnetosphere around the moon, the first time a magnetic field had been found to emanate from any moon in the solar system. The discovery may lead to a better understanding of the interior of Ganymede.
    The Galileo camera team will combine some of the images from this flyby with those from the previous flyby to generate stereo views of the fractured, fault-ridden surface of Ganymede. The stereo views will allow scientists to determine whether dark areas in images of the surface are due to the moon's topography or variations in surface composition.
    Galileo also took time during the flyby to take images of Europa and Callisto as well as Jupiter itself. The data will be radioed back to Earth between now and the end of October.
    The next flyby for Galileo will be November 4, when it passes 1,100 km (685 mi.) from the surface of Callisto, the outermost of the four large Galilean satellites of Jupiter. More flybys are planned through 1997.