Space Shuttle Discovery rocketed from Launch Pad 39A, Kennedy Space Center, on 11 October 2000, at 6:17 PM CDT (23:17 GMT) to begin her mission to rendezvous and dock with ISS. STS-92 spent the next 42+ hours "chasing" ISSy (International Space Station), with docking taking place on 13 October at 12:45 PM CDT (17:45 GMT). The CREW boarded an as yet uninhabited space station to begin seven days of work preparing the craft for the Expedition One Crew, expected at the beginning of November 2000.

The main mission of STS-92 (ISS Assembly Flight 3A) was to deliver and install the primary Cargo which consisted of the Z-1 Truss and PMA-3 (Pressurized Mating Adaptor 3). The Z-1 Truss is of critical importance to ISSy, in that it houses the four control moment gyros, and will mount the main solar arrays. PMA-3 adds another docking port to ISS for visiting Space Shuttles. The Z-1 Truss was positioned on ISSy using Discovery's Canadarm prior to the Astronauts venturing out to complete the final connections.

Four EVAs (Extra-Vehicular Activity or spacewalk) were carried out from the Shuttle airlock by Astronauts Bill McArthur, Leroy Chiao, Jeff Wisoff, and Michael Lopez-Algeria. EVA-1 saw work done with connections and modifications to the Z-1 Truss. EVA-2 was mainly concerned with installing PMA-3 with the help of the Canadarm. Some more work with the Z-1 Truss was also completed. EVA-3 included further work toward completion of the Z-1 installation. EVA-4, the last of them, finished the job of outfitting and setting up the Truss. Total time on EVA was 20 hours 7 minutes.

After a very successful week working on ISSy, the STS-92 crew bid their temporary home goodbye, and undocked on 20 October at 10:08 AM CDT (15:08 GMT). Four days later, Discovery landed safely on 24 October 2000, at 4:01 PM CDT (21:01 GMT). The landing took place at Edwards Air Force Base (NASA's Dryden Research) in the California desert, due to high and dangerous winds at the KSC landing facility. Total flight duration: 12 days 21 hours 43 minutes.

Due to what NASA claimed were "technical difficulties", normally seen Ku-Band full motion TV downlink was "lost" around seven hours into the mission. There were a very few brief bits of television, relayed to NASA Select TV by ground stations during "line of sight" passes of Discovery over those locations. For most of the flight, we were only allowed those annoying S-Band "slide shows", or as NASA refers to them, SSV (Sequential Still Video). This event is one of those cases...

At dawn on 13 October 2000 at 8:41 AM CDT (13:41 GMT), Discovery was approaching ISSy for final docking. Both were sailing high over the Central Pacific Ocean, with the Space Shuttle pointing its tail toward deep space. One of the aft payload bay cameras was activated, and gave us a series of S-Band still frames, refreshing about every 25 to 30 seconds. During this brief span of seven frames, a bell shaped object was visible for four of those frames. This amounted to just under two minutes time. For our puposes, only five of the frames will be used, as the last two without the anomaly are redundant. (An object very much like this one appeared during the flight of STS-101 in May 2000, and in the middle of a Chinese test of their Shenzhou space craft sometime in 1999.)

After being in the field of view for this length of time, the object very suddenly just disappeared! Not the usual behavior of ice, debris, lens flares, or anything else this writer is familiar with after watching space flight on TV for over four decades.

An animated GIF has been prepared from still frames taken from the original video recorded live at the time of the event. There are also a series of still frames included below for your familiarization with the circumstances involved.

How about we take a look at the visual presentation which has been prepared for you now, OK?

Discovery (seen inside the yellow circle) was flying over the Mid-Pacific Ocean, just below the equator. The land mass to the far right is South America. She was just coming into orbital dawn when the incident happened.

The direction in which the camera was pointing is indicated by the red arrow.

This is a computer generated image shown on NASA Select TV that day, as operations continued without "live" TV coverage. Discovery was preparing to dock with the incomplete, and still uninhabited three module ISSy. The brand new Zvezda, or service module had been launched in July 2000. This module was essential to ISS before it could be occupied.

Next is a small animation labelled to indicate where things are, and what to watch for.

Marked out for you are the object, where the crew resides, the Z-1 Truss in the payload bay, and the location of the Ku-Band TV dish. This is what relays TV and communications signals back to Earth.

The red lines point out common lens flare caused by the Sun. The true lens flares are nearly stationary, and remain AFTER the anomaly has disappeared.

Now we will study the animated GIF which shows us the anomaly, how it hovered nearby, and suddenly vanished!

Note how the anomalous object seems to be slowly withdrawing from the vicinity before disappearing. See how similar it is to the objects seen during STS-101 in May 2000, and in China sometime in late 1999.

Same five frames with colors reversed.