STS-41 was the 36th Space Shuttle mission and the eleventh mission of the Space Shuttle Discovery. The four-day mission had a primary objective of launching the Ulysses probe as part of the "International Solar Polar Mission" (ISPM). Discovery lifted off on October 6 1990 at 7:47:16 a.m. EDT. Liftoff occurred 12 minutes after a two-and-a-half-hour launch window opened that day at 7:35 a.m. EDT. STS-41 featured the heaviest payload to date; Discovery weighed 117,749 kg (259,592 lb).

The primary payload was the European Space Agency (ESA)-built Ulysses spacecraft to explore the polar regions of the Sun. Attached to Ulysses were two upper stages, the Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) and a mission-specific Payload Assist Module-S (PAM-S), combined for the first time to send Ulysses toward an out-of-ecliptic trajectory. Other payloads and experiments included the Shuttle Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet (SSBUV) experiment, Intelsat Solar Array Coupon (ISAC), Chromosome and Plant Cell Division Experiment (CHROMEX), Voice Command System (VCS), Solid Surface Combustion Experiment (SSCE), Investigations into Polymer Membrane Processing (IPMP), Physiological Systems Experiment (PSE), Radiation Monitoring Experiment III (RME III), Shuttle Student Involvement Program (SSIP) and Air Force Maui Optical Site (AMOS). We celebrate this mission with a scale model of the Discovery over the Earth …