19901776 Club
Discovery carries the heaviest shuttle payload yet, then lets go of Ulysses
Six hours after liftoff, the European-built probe begins a five-year detour through Jupiter toward the Sun's unseen poles.
Every spacecraft before Ulysses had stayed in the plane where the planets orbit, never looking down on the Sun's poles. On October 6, 1990, at 7:47 a.m. EDT, Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off on STS-41 carrying the heaviest payload flown to date, 117,749 kilograms. Six hours into the flight, the crew deployed Ulysses, a joint NASA-ESA probe, into low Earth orbit, where upper-stage rockets would fling it toward Jupiter. Discovery landed at Edwards Air Force Base four days later; by then Ulysses had already covered 1.6 million kilometers of its five-year journey…
