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STS-42 Mission Overview

Spacelab is a fully equipped space laboratory developed by the European Space Agency- as its contribution to the Space shuttle Program. Carried in the space shuttle's cargo bay it is connected by a tunnel to the shuttle's middeck. It provides a shirt-sleeve environment containing computers, work areas, instrument racks for experiments and all the necessary utilities such as data links and power supplies. Spacelab has been used in previous shuttle flights, and will be used for the IML series as well as other scientific missions.

More recently, a Spacelab module was used for the first Space Life Sciences mission (SLS-1) which was dedicated entirely to medical and biological investigation.