KSC-98pc1393

STS-95 Payload Specialist Chiaki Mukai, with the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA), waves on her arrival at Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Landing Facility aboard a T-38 jet. She and other crewmembers will be making final preparations for launch, targeted for liftoff at 2 p.m. on Oct. 29. The STS-95 mission includes research payloads such as the Spartan solar-observing deployable spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope Orbital Systems Test Platform, the International Extreme Ultraviolet Hitchhiker, as well as the SPACEHAB single module with experiments on space flight and the aging process. The mission is expected to last 8 days, 21 hours and 49 minutes, and return to KSC on Nov. 7. The other STS-95 crewmembers are Mission Commander Curtis L. Brown Jr., Pilot Steven W. Lindsey, Mission Specialist Scott E. Parazynski, Mission Specialist Stephen K. Robinson, Payload Specialist John H. Glenn Jr., senator from Ohio, and Mission Specialist Pedro Duque, with the European Space Agency (ESA)