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Lifting off with the STS-41 crew on board Discovery, the Ulysses probe was deployed from the shuttle's payload bay six hours into the four-day mission. Originally targeted for 1983, a number of delays, including the loss of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, resulted in the spacecraft not leaving Earth until Oct.
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The real Ulysses probe, which studied the sun from 1994 to 2009, was also late to launch. If designed to the same scale as the 1:70th orbiter, the Ulysses should be able to fit into Discovery's payload bay (opens in new tab), offering a second "mission" for the orbiter after the Hubble Space Telescope included with the Discovery set. Originally scheduled for release with the NASA Space Shuttle Discovery set (opens in new tab) that went on sale on April 1, Lego delayed the Ulysses probe reward due to an unstated issue. Based on a published photo of the assembled kit, the Lego Ulysses will include the solar probe, as well as the Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) and Payload Assist Module-S (PAM-S) that were attached to the sun-bound spacecraft when it was deployed from the space shuttle Discovery and were used to boost it out of Earth orbit toward Jupiter for a gravity-assist to circle the sun.