The Experimental Assembly of Structures in EVA and the Assembly Concept for Construction of Erectable Space Structures, or EASE/ACCESS, were a pair of space shuttle flight experiments that were performed on STS-61-B, on November 29 and December 1, 1985. The purpose of the experiments was to study how quickly astronauts would become proficient at assembling space structures during extravehicular activity, and how quickly they would become fatigued, and to explore various construction and maintenance techniques. In particular, researchers studied the applied moments of inertia arising in the manual assembly of a large space structure.
EASE was a project of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and the Space Systems Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and later at the University of Maryland, while ACCESS was developed by NASA's Langley Research Center.
Read more about EASE/ACCESS: Experiment and EVAs, Results, Conclusion
Famous quotes containing the words ease and/or access:
“In England, I was quite struck to see how forward the girls are made—a child of 10 years old, will chat and keep you company, while her parents are busy or out etc.—with the ease of a woman of 26. But then, how does this education go on?—Not at all: it absolutely stops short.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)