The sphere at Mir

Atlantis docked with Mir in May 1997 on the STS-84 mission. According to the archive's one telling a sphere on the shuttle camera came to a direct stop, hovered, then moved up and behind Mir to emerge on the other side. Dozens of other anomalous objects appeared in the same footage. The telling adds that NASA refuses to release the pristine version.

What is on the record

The archive resolves one claimant, Martin Stubbs, and that resolution is wrong. The telling credits the STS-84 footage to an amateur it names only as Willie, who taped the shuttle's downlink and passed it around; Martyn Stubbs, the Vancouver cable manager whose own tapes fill the rest of the same video, is not the source of this sequence. The telling also offers its own mundane candidate for the cloud of other objects, a toilet flush from the shuttle. The crews of Atlantis and Mir are silent in the file.

Outside the archive's holdings the docking is documented; the sphere is not. The archive has found no treatment of this clip beyond the compilation that carries it. The explanation of record for points of light on shuttle cameras is debris and ice close to the lens, and a near particle drifting across a distant station will seem to pass behind it. Whether that also covers a stop and a hover is the open question, and nobody outside the compilation has taken it up. The claim that NASA withholds a cleaner copy rests on the telling alone.

Why it sits where it does

This is an L0 record, a single account, and its named claimant is a resolution error the archive has yet to correct. The grade counts sourcing; the sphere it leaves alone. What moved past Mir on the STS-84 feed is not resolved here.