Had Challenger not exploded, Columbia was set to fly a further four missions during the course of 1986. It would have been the most she had ever flown in a single calendar year and, judging from the impossibly short seven weeks expected to get her ready for STS-61E, probably could not have been realistically achieved. On the 6 March flight, she and another seven-man crew would have been launched to spend eight days in orbit with the ASTRO-1 observatory of three ultraviolet telescopes affixed to a pair of Spacelab pallets in the payload bay.