STS-75

STS-75 was Columbia's February-March 1996 Space Shuttle mission carrying the Tethered Satellite System Reflight and the third United States Microgravity Payload. Columbia launched from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39B on February 22 and landed on Runway 33 at the Shuttle Landing Facility on March 9. The seven-person crew included astronauts from NASA and ESA plus Italian payload specialist Umberto Guidoni. The joint NASA-Italian Space Agency TSS-1R experiment deployed more than 19 kilometers of tether and returned valuable electrodynamics and plasma measurements, including currents at least three times higher than predicted, before the tether broke short of full deployment and the satellite was lost. USMP-3 operated nominally, conducting materials-science and condensed-matter investigations through telescience during Columbia's extended mission.