While it's not unusual these days to turn on the TV and watch construction projects going on in outer space, it is a bit out of the ordinary when ants - not astronauts - are the ones doing the building.

Fifteen harvester ants are on board the shuttle Columbia as part of a student experiment to study the effects of weightlessness on behavior. Judging by video of the ant colony beamed down to mission control this afternoon, the absence of gravity doesn't seem to be bothering the workers all that much as they busily dig tunnels in a special gel.

The astronauts, of course, are busy with higher-priority payloads and experiments, working around the clock in two shifts to maximize the data that will be collected during this 16-day mission. More than 80 experiments are on board and mission managers are pleased with the initial progress of the flight.

"It's great to finally be in orbit," said Phil Engelauf, a senior flight director at the Johnson Space Center. "Spaceflight is a team sport and there's a huge number of people involved in getting a mission off the ground and executing it. And that's especially true of STS-107.

"We had a beautiful launch (Thursday), the vehicle is performing exceptionally well, we're very, very clean, with only one or two extremely minor issues to work on at this point. The crew is doing well on the timeline, most of the payload activations are complete - all of them scheduled up to this point are completed - with only a few remaining to be performed as scheduled later in the mission.

"So we're doing really, really well. ... Everyone is extremely pleased with what we've accomplished in the first 24 hours of the flight."

The only problems so far are minor. A backup intercom channel is not working properly, one of two heaters in a fuel cell tank did not turn on this morning and ground controllers are working to straighten out a data processing issue. But Engelauf said none of these issues would have an impact on the flight.

Mission scientist John Charles said "all in all, things are going as scheduled and we're looking forward to, I can't believe it, over two weeks of detailed and highly intensive data collection from a lot of experiments that have been waiting a long time for this chance to fly in space."

Because Columbia's KU-band antenna system is being used to transmit realtime science data to the ground, television showing the crew will be in extremely short supply during this flight. Every day or so, however, the astronauts will beam down 10 minutes or so of "crew choice video" showing whatever they think might be interesting to the public. The first such session is planned for 6:09 p.m. this evening.

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