|
|
|
|
|
Endeavour arrives at station for international delivery BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: March 13, 2008 The shuttle Endeavour glided to a gentle docking with the international space station late Wednesday as the two spacecraft sailed 212 miles above Malaysia at five miles per second. With commander Dominic Gorie at the controls, the shuttle's docking system engaged its counterpart on the front of the lab complex at 11:49 p.m. to wrap up a two-day orbital chase that began with Endeavour's sky-lighting blastoff early Tuesday. "Houston, Endeavour, capture confirmed," a shuttle astronaut radioed as the two vehicles came together. "Houston copies," astronaut Terry Virts replied from mission control. "Houston, Endeavour, we see flashing lights. Free drift." "And Alpha can verify station is in free drift," Expedition 16 commander Peggy Whitson confirmed. In keeping with naval tradition, she then rang the ship's bell in the Destiny laboratory module, saying "Endeavour, arriving." "Peggy, that's the sweetest sound I've ever heard," Gorie said. "Thank you very much." Whitson, flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko and outgoing European Space Agency astronaut Leopold Eyharts welcomed Gorie and his crewmates - pilot Gregory Johnson, flight engineer Michael Foreman, Richard Linnehan, Robert Behnken, Japanese astronaut Takao Doi and space station flight engineer Garrett Reisman - aboard at 1:36 a.m., a little more than one orbit after docking. "Today was a textbook rendezvous and docking," said lead flight director Mike Moses. "I couldn't have asked for anything better, picture perfect. ... It was a great rendezvous." After a mandatory safety briefing to familiarize the shuttle astronauts with emergency procedures, the two crews got busy transferring spacesuits and other equipment to the station's Quest airlock to prepare for the mission's first spacewalk overnight Thursday. They also planned to transfer astronaut Garrett Reisman's Soyuz seat liner to the station's Russian ferry craft, allowing him to replace Eyharts as a member of the Expedition 16 crew. Eyharts, launched to the outpost in February to help activate the European Space Agency's new Columbus research module, will return to Earth aboard Endeavour after six weeks in space. "Our EVA crews ... are transferring all the EVA gear in prep for (Thursday night's) EVA," Moses said. "Garrett Reisman, our crew member that we're taking up for Expedition 16 and going to leave behind, and Yuri are busy installing his seat liner in the Soyuz. They're going to do a leak check on his Sokol suit, his Russian entry suit, to make sure he's good to go, at which point he'll become an official ISS crew member." Reisman and Linnehan will sleep in the station's Quest airlock module at a reduced pressure of 10.2 pounds per square inch. The so-called "camp-out" procedure is designed to help purge nitrogen from the astronauts' bloodstreams and prevent the bends after working in NASA's five-psi spacesuits. The goal of Thursday's spacewalk, the first of five EVAs planned for the mission, is to prepare a Japanese logistics module for attachment to the station and to begin assembly of a Canadian Space Agency robot known as the special purpose dextrous manipulator, or Dextre for short. Dextre is an attachment that will, in effect, give the station's Canadian-built robot arm two hands and the ability to remotely change out components that might otherwise require a spacewalk. The disassembled Dextre robot, designed to operate in weightlessness, has been tested but never fully assembled on Earth. It made the climb to space in pieces bolted to a Spacelab pallet in the shuttle's cargo bay. Behnken and Johnson, operating the station's robot arm from inside the Destiny lab module, pulled the pallet out of the cargo bay three hours after docking. The pallet will be attached to a grapple fixture on the side of the mobile base system normally used to move the station arm along the front face of the main solar power truss. Moses said Wednesday's rendezvous went off without a hitch, starting round 8:42 p.m. with a critical rocket firing as Endeavour trailed the station by about 9.2 miles. After reaching a point about 600 feet directly below the lab complex, Gorie fired small maneuvering jets to put the shuttle through a slow 360-degree back flip, exposing the ship's heat shield to cameras on the space station. Whitson, using a camera with a 400-mm lens, and Malenchenko, wielding an 800-mm telephoto, shot dozens of digital pictures of the shuttle's belly as the spacecraft streaked over Australia to help engineers assess the health of the ship's heat shield. No obvious problems could be seen in television views from the station, but it will take image analysts another day or so to examine the 300 or so pictures downlinked by Whitson and Malenchenko. Initial analysis of imagery and laser scan data collected overnight Tuesday show Endeavour's reinforced carbon carbon nose cap and wing leading edge panels, which experience the most extreme heating during re-entry, came through launch in good shape. "There weren't very many regions of interest at all and they don't suspect we're going to have any focused inspection requirements," Moses said. "We'll let them officially chew over that and decide that later tonight. But quick look was that that all looked great yesterday." "We also got word that the debris we saw at about 10 seconds that appeared to pass over the nose and possibly strike (the shuttle), the image analysis has confirmed that it did not strike the orbiter. It didn't come near the vehicle." Moses said engineers initially thought the object, possibly a bird, hit the nose of the shuttle because at the moment the trajectory seemed to indicate a hit, a protective cover over a rocket nozzle pulled away in the wind as designed. Closer analysis, however, showed the two were unrelated events and that the mystery object passed out of view behind a shuttle booster and did not strike the orbiter. "You can see in the video there's clearly something coming from above the orbiter," Moses said. "And it passes behind the SRB (solid rocket booster), it doesn't go near the nose of the shuttle. About the same time, about two frames later, a Tyvek cover releases off the nose and so you see the streak start again and you could have drawn a conclusion that it was the same piece of debris. The analyst folks have looked at that and it's definitely not, it's two separate events. And so whatever it was that was coming from above passed behind us. I don't have any idea what that is."
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
VIDEO:
THURSDAY'S MISSION STATUS BRIEFING 