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Endeavour approaching station for docking today BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: August 10, 2007 The shuttle Endeavour is closing in on the international space station this morning, on track for a docking around 1:54 p.m. The terminal phase of the rendezvous begins at 11:16 a.m. when commander Scott Kelly and pilot Charles "Scorch" Hobaugh fire the shuttle's maneuvering rockets to begin moving in from a point about 9.2 miles behind the space station. A few minutes before 1 p.m. - about an hour before docking - the shuttle will move into position some 600 feet directly below the space station. At that point, Kelly will guide the orbiter through a slow 360-degree back flip, exposing the shuttle's belly and critical heat-shield tiles to the crew aboard the station. Expedition 15 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, flight engineer Oleg Kotov and Clay Anderson will film the maneuver using video and digital still cameras equipped with 400 mm and 800 mm lenses to capture high-resolution images of Endeavour's heat shield. It will take about 10 minutes to complete the rendezvous pitch maneuver. After that, Kelly plans to guide Endeavour in an arc up to a point about 300 feet directly in front of the space station with the shuttle's nose pointed toward deep space and its open payload bay facing the front end of the lab complex. From there, Kelly will carefully guide Endeavour in to a docking at pressurize mating adapter No. 2 on the front end of the Destiny laboratory module. "The rendezvous will be pretty much a standard rendezvous as you've seen before," said shuttle flight director Matt Abbott. "We'll approach from behind and below the station. When we come to a point about 600 feet below the station on what we call the R-bar, we'll do the R-bar pitch maneuver, sometimes called the rendezvous pitch maneuver, which is the 360-degree back flip that allows the space station crew Fyodor and Oleg to take photographs of the underside of the vehicle. So we'll get some high resolution photographs of the tiles and all the thermal protection system to be able to analyze that on the ground and make sure it's all in good shape. "After the RPM is complete, Scott and Scorch will transition the vehicle up to what we call the V-bar, the velocity vector, which is out in front of the direction the space station is traveling. And then Scott will begin a slow and methodical manual approach into docking on PMA-2. There's a little pause at 30 feet, which allows the crew the ability to fly out any angular errors, which we may or may not need to do, and then we go in and dock." As with the past several station assembly missions, docking is merely one more step in a busy day of work. While part of the crew carries out leak checks and works to open hatches between the two spacecraft, astronaut Tracy Caldwell plans to use the shuttle's robot arm to pull a 5,000-pound solar array truss segment known as S5 from Endeavour's cargo bay. After hatches are opened and the station crew welcomes their shuttle colleagues aboard, Hobaugh will use the station's robot arm to latch onto S5. He then will move the truss segment to an overnight park position near the right side of the station's solar array truss where it will remain until installation Saturday. "After docking, we have about two hours of hatch operations, leak checks, configuration of the shuttle to kind of get ready for the docked mission," said station flight director Joel Montalbano. "While we're doing the hatch checks and getting the EVA suits ready and getting everything ready for docked operations, we'll go ahead and grapple the S5. We'll have a short safety briefing, a meet and greet, and then it's down to work pretty quickly. "We have a rule that we only move one of the robotic arms at a time and so, prior to (Caldwell) moving the S5 out of the payload bay, Scorch will have positioned the station arm to be ready for handoff. Tracy will go ahead and take the payload to Scorch and again, we're using different camera views on board the shuttle assets and station assets on both robotics teams to make sure they have good views. What will happen is Scorch will go ahead and grab the S5 payload. The shuttle arm will back off and we'll stay in that position overnight." The S5 truss segment will be attached Saturday during a spacewalk by astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Dave Williams. Both astronauts will spend the night in the station's Quest airlock module at a reduced pressure of 10.2 pounds per square inch to help purge their bodies of nitrogen. The low-pressure airlock "camp out" is needed to help prevent the bends after working in NASA's 5-psi spacesuits. Here is an updated timeline of critical events, based on the crew's rendezvous timeline, revision D of the NASA television schedule and the crew's flight plan (in EDT and mission elapsed time; NOTE: NASA rounds down to the nearest minute while this page rounds up or down as required): EDT........DD...HH...MM...EVENT 08/10/07 07:37 AM...01...13...00...STS/ISS crew wakeup 08:30 AM...01...13...54...NASA video file on NTV 08:42 AM...01...14...05...Group B computer powerup 08:57 AM...01...14...20...Begin rendezvous timeline 09:45 AM...01...15...08...NC-4 rendezvous rocket firing 10:47 AM...01...16...10...Spacehab prepped for docking 11:16 AM...01...16...39...TI rendezvous burn; Range: 9.2 miles 11:27 AM...01...16...50...Spacesuit removal 11:52 AM...01...17...15...Sunset 12:00 PM...01...17...23...U.S. solar arrays feathered 12:14 PM...01...17...37...Range: 10,000 feet 12:23 PM...01...17...46...Range: 5,000 feet 12:24 PM...01...17...47...Sunrise 12:29 PM...01...17...52...Range: 3,000 feet 12:33 PM...01...17...56...MC-4 rendezvous rocket firing 12:37 PM...01...18...00...Approach timeline begins 12:37 PM...01...18...00...Range: 1,500 feet 12:38 PM...01...18...01...Rendezvous pitch maneuver (RPM) start window open 12:42 PM...01...18...05...Range: 1,000 feet 12:45 PM...01...18...08...KU antenna to low power 12:46 PM...01...18...09...Shuttle directly below ISS 12:51 PM...01...18...14...Range: 600 feet 12:53 PM...01...18...16...Start rendezvous pitch maneuver 12:54 PM...01...18...17...Noon 01:01 PM...01...18...24...End rendezvous pitch maneuver 01:01 PM...01...18...24...RPM full photo window close 01:03 PM...01...18...26...Initiate pitch up maneuver 01:09 PM...01...18...32...RPM start window close 01:15 PM...01...18...38...Shuttle directly in front of station; range: 310 feet 01:16 PM...01...18...39...Range: 300 feet 01:20 PM...01...18...43...Range: 250 feet 01:23 PM...01...18...46...Sunset 01:24 PM...01...18...47...Range: 200 feet 01:27 PM...01...18...50...Range: 170 feet 01:28 PM...01...18...51...Range: 150 feet 01:32 PM...01...18...55...Range: 100 feet 01:35 PM...01...18...58...Range: 75 feet 01:40 PM...01...19...03...Range: 50 feet 01:43 PM...01...19...06...Range: 30 feet; start station keeping 01:48 PM...01...19...11...End station keeping; push to dock 01:52 PM...01...19...15...Range: 10 feet 01:54 PM...01...19...17...DOCKING 01:56 PM...01...19...19...Sunrise 02:17 PM...01...19...40...Leak checks 02:17 PM...01...19...40...Post-rendezvous laptop reconfig 02:47 PM...01...20...10...Airlock prepped for ingress 02:57 PM...01...20...20...Group B computer powerdown 03:17 PM...01...20...40...Shuttle arm (SRMS) grapples S5 03:22 PM...01...20...45...Hatch opening 03:32 PM...01...20...55...Spacehab post-docking reconfig 03:32 PM...01...20...55...SRMS unberths S5 04:02 PM...01...21...25...Welcome aboard! 04:07 PM...01...21...30...Safety briefing 04:32 PM...01...21...55...Station arm (SSRMS) moves to pre-grapple position 04:52 PM...01...22...15...SRMS maneuvers 05:22 PM...01...22...45...SSRMS grapples S5 05:30 PM...01...22...54...Mission status briefing on NASA TV 05:37 PM...01...23...00...SRMS ungrapples S5 05:37 PM...01...23...00...Equipment lock prep 06:07 PM...01...23...30...REBA checkout 06:22 PM...01...23...45...EVA tools transferred to ISS 06:37 PM...02...00...00...Station-to-shuttle power transfer system activated 06:42 PM...02...00...05...EVA-1: Tools prepped 07:22 PM...02...00...45...EVA-1: Procedures review 10:02 PM...02...03...25...EVA-1: Mask pre-breathe 10:47 PM...02...04...10...EVA-1: Airlock depress to 10.2 psi 11:07 PM...02...04...30...ISS crew sleep begins 11:37 PM...02...05...00...STS crew sleep begin 08:07 AM...02...13...30...STS/ISS crew wakeup
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MISSION INDEX |
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VIDEO:
FIRST IN-SPACE COMMENTS FROM BARBARA MORGAN 