Highlights of the 10-day mission include five days of docked operations between Atlantis and Mir and the exchange of crew members Foale and Wolf to continue a permanent American presence of the Russia complex.

Atlantis will carry the SPACEHAB double module to support the transfer of logistics and supplies for Mir and the return of experiment hardware and specimens to Earth.

During the space walk, Foale remained inside the Soyuz capsule attached to Mir, in constant communication with the cosmonauts as well as ground controllers.

On 5 September, Foale and Solovyev conducted a six-hour external extravehicular activity to survey damage outside Spektr and to try to pinpoint where the breach of the module's hull occurred.

Two undamaged arrays were manually repositioned to better gather solar energy, and a radiation device left previously by Jerry Linenger was retrieved.

Wolf will be replaced by the seventh and last U.S. astronaut to transfer to Mir, Andrew S. W. Thomas, when the orbiter Endeavour docks with the Russian space station during the STS-89 mission in January 1998.

During the five-hour, one-minute space walk on 1 October, the pair affixed a 121-pound (55 kilograms (121 lb)) Solar Array Cap to the docking module for future use by Mir crew members to seal off the suspected leak in Spektr's hull.

During the flight, Wetherbee and Bloomfield fired small jet thrusters on Atlantis to provide data for the Mir Structural Dynamics Experiment (MISDE), which measures disturbances to space station components and its solar arrays.