STS-112 MISSION ARCHIVE (COMPLETE) Updated: 10/18/02 Space station assembly mission 9A (S0 truss) By William Harwood CBS News/Kennedy Space Center The following copy originally was posted on the Current Mission space page at http://cbsnews.com/network/news/space/current.html. Comments, suggestions and corrections welcome! TABLE OF CONTENTS Shuttle flights on hold (06/24/02) Engineers inspect Endeavour for flow liner cracks (07/09/02) Cracks found in Endeavour's propulsion system (07/10/02) Shuttle flights off until at least September (07/12/02) NASA mulls launch options; Columbia slip likely (07/18-19/02) Columbia to leapfrog next two shuttle flights (07/26/02) Thomas removed from station crew (07/26/02) Weld repair approved; next launch targeted for Sept. 28 (08/01/02) Progress, Soyuz, November shuttle flight delayed (08/08/02) Atlantis set for trip to pad, 10/2 launch (09/09/02) NASA tracks potential threats from Isidore, Lili (09/24/02) Unmanned Progress supply ship docks with station (09/29/02) STS-112 mission preview (09/27/02) Shuttle countdown begins (09/30/02) Hurricane Lili threatens mission control (09/30/02) Shuttle launch delayed by hurrican threat to JSC (10/01/02) Launch delayed to Oct. 7 (10/02/02) Atlantis tentatively cleared for flight (10/06/02) Shuttle Atlantis rockets into orbit (10/07/02) Astronauts prepare for station docking (10/08/02) Atlantis docks with space station(10/09/02) S1 truss installed during first spacewalk (10/10/02) Astronauts take time off; CBS News interview (10/11/02) Astronauts stage second spacewalk; continue S1 outfitting (10/12/02) S1 radiator deploy held yp; Whitson describes life in space (10/13/02) Wolf, Sellers stage third EVA to outfit S1 (10/14/02) Astronauts wrap up station work (10/15/02) Shuttle undocks from space station (10/16/02) Astronauts test re-entry systems, prepare for home (10/17/02) Atlantis returns to Earth (10/18/02) =================================================================== Shuttle flights on hold (06/24/02) NASA's next shuttle mission - the planned July 19 launch of Columbia on a science mission featuring the first Israeli astronaut - will be delayed at least "a few weeks" because of potentially dangerous cracks found in the propulsion systems of two other orbiters. At issue is the health of metal liners mounted inside the propellant lines that feel supercold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen to a shuttle's three main engines. Recent inspections of the fuel flow liners aboard Atlantis and Discovery revealed cracks measuring up to three-tenths of an inch long. Should a liner rupture or break apart during ascent, the high-speed flow of propellants would be disrupted at the very least. Whether any fragments could be ingested by an engine, possibly with catastrophic results, is not yet clear. But the cracks pose an unknown safety risk and shuttle program manager Ronald Dittemore wants to find out whether the flow liners aboard Columbia have experienced similar problems. At the same time, engineers are assessing what must be done to fix the already discovered cracks. NASA had planned to haul Columbia to the launch pad in the next few days to begin final preparations for launch July 19. But work to ready the ship for rollover from its hangar to the Vehicle Assembly Building for attachment to a pair of boosters and its external tank was put on hold over the weekend. Atlantis is scheduled for launch Aug. 22 on the next space station assembly flight. Depending on how the flow liner issue plays out, Atlantis could end up launching before Columbia. But at this point, trying to guess how the launch schedule might work out is pretty much an exercise in futility. Here is the text of a NASA statement on the issue: RELEASE: 02-117 NASA MANAGERS DELAY STS-107 LAUNCH NASA managers today temporarily suspended launch preparations for Space Shuttle Columbia until they have a better understanding of several small cracks found in metal liners used to direct the flow inside main propulsion-system propellant lines on other orbiters in the fleet. Columbia's launch on STS-107, previously planned for July 19, will be delayed a few weeks to allow inspections of its flow liners as part of an intensive analysis that is under way. Recent inspections of Space Shuttle Atlantis and Space Shuttle Discovery found cracks, measuring one-tenth to three-tenths of an inch, in one flow liner on each of those vehicles. Some of the cracks were not identifiable using standard visual inspections and were only discovered using more intensive inspection techniques. "These cracks may pose a safety concern and we have teams at work investigating all aspects of the situation," said Space Shuttle Program Manager Ron Dittemore. "This is a very complex issue and it is early in the analysis. Right now there are more questions than answers. Our immediate interests are to inspect the hardware to identify cracks that exist, understand what has caused them and quantify the risk. I am confident the team will fully resolve this issue, but it may take some time. Until we have a better understanding, we will not move forward with the launch of STS-107." The impact of the investigation on other upcoming space shuttle launches has not been determined. =================================================================== Engineers inspect Endeavour for flow liner cracks (07/09/02) NASA managers and contractors are continuing to work through an exhaustive series of inspections and tests to determine what caused small but potentially dangerous cracks in shuttle fuel line baffles that have now been found in three of the agency's four orbiters. The main propulsion system in the fourth shuttle - Endeavour - is being inspected this week. Until engineers complete their analysis and determine what, if anything, needs to be done to fix the propellant flow liner cracks, the next shuttle flight is on hold. But contrary to widespread news accounts saying the shuttle fleet is "grounded," only one flight has actually be delayed at this point: Launch of the shuttle Columbia on a 16-day microgravity research mission featuring the first Israeli astronaut. That flight, STS-107, originally was scheduled for takeoff July 19. But on June 24, NASA managers put pre-launch processing on hold pending the outcome of the flow liner crack investigation. At this point, the earliest Columbia could be launched, assuming processing resumed right away, is mid to late August. In the meantime, engineers are continuing to process the shuttle Atlantis for launch Aug. 22 on the next space station assembly mission. That flight, in theory at least, could still be launched on schedule if the crack issue is quickly resolved. The year's final flight, launch of the shuttle Endeavour on a mission to deliver a fresh crew to the station and to bring the lab's current occupants back to Earth, is targeted for launch in mid October. While NASA is in no undue rush to resolve the flow liner crack issue, the station crew's time in orbit is a definite concern. The Expedition 5 increment is targeted to last about four-and-a-half months. But commander Valeri Korzun, Sergei Treschev and NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson have more than enough on-board supplies to remain aboard the lab complex well beyond Endeavour's current launch date. And if all else fails, they could always return to Earth aboard the station's Soyuz lifeboat. But that possibility is so remote at this point that "worst-case scenario" does not really apply. The worst-case scenario at this point is simply that Expedition 5's time aloft could be extended. "Before we launched, I assumed I would be here at least six months," Whitson told an interviewer today. "So I think I could handle up to six months with no problem." The cracks in question have now been found in flow liners inside the hydrogen fuel lines aboard Columbia, Atlantis and Discovery. The flow liners, mounted inside the big propellant lines that feed the shuttle's main engines, are designed to ensure incoming liquid hydrogen enters each engine in a uniform manner. Should even a small part of a liner break off, it could be carried downstream and "ingested" by a main engine high-pressure hydrogen turbopump, possibly triggering a catastrophic shutdown. The cracks detected in Atlantis and Discovery are located where the flow liners cross over the gimbal joints closest to the point where the incoming 12-inch hydrogen lines enter the main engines. On Atlantis, there are three small cracks in the flow liner leading to main engine No. 1. Two of these are circumferential cracks while one is axial. On Discovery, three axial cracks were found. Data on the locations of cracks found in Columbia's flow liners are not yet available and inspections of Endeavour are not yet complete. "These cracks may pose a safety concern and we have teams at work investigating all aspects of the situation," shuttle program manager Ronald Dittemore said June 24. "This is a very complex issue and it is early in the analysis. Right now, there are more questions than answers." NASA's immediate concern, he said, was to "inspect the hardware to identify cracks that exist, understand what has caused them and quantify the risk." "I am confident the team will fully resolve this issue, but it may take some time," Dittemore said. "Until we have a better understanding, we will not move forward with the launch of STS-107." If repairs are required, engineers likely will attempt to weld or drill out the cracks with the flow liners still installed in each shuttle. Removing the liners for repairs is a worst-case scenario that could delay the next shuttle flight to late this year at the earliest. But most engineers and managers believe whatever repairs may be required can be done with the flow liners in place. And at this point, it's not clear any repairs will be needed. One school of thought holds the cracks probably developed many years ago, possibly during the first few times each orbiter's propulsion system was exposed to supercold liquid oxygen and hydrogen. Under that theory, the cracks pose no safety threat and shuttles can be safely launched as is. Another school of thought holds that areas where the cracks were found should be strengthened to make absolutely sure the cracks cannot grow. That possibly could be done by drilling small holes at the ends of each crack to stop potential growth or by employing high-tech welding techniques. But Dittemore is not expected to make any decisions until after Endeavour's flow liners are inspected this week and the results of a detailed engineer analysis are complete. =================================================================== Cracks found in Endeavour's propulsion system (07/10/02) Engineers inspecting the shuttle Endeavour's main propulsion system plumbing have found at least one crack in a fuel flow liner leading to one of the ship's main engines. The defect is similar to small cracks discovered earlier in NASA's other three space shuttles. A telephone news conference with shuttle program manager Ronald Dittemore is planned for Friday morning. A detailed update will be posted here after the news briefing. =================================================================== Shuttle flights off until at least September (07/12/02) NASA's shuttle fleet will remain "grounded" until at least mid September and possibly longer because of small but potentially dangerous cracks in hydrogen feed lines in all four of the agency's orbiters. But shuttle program manager Ronald Dittemore told reporters today he is optimistic that in the next few weeks engineers will either clear the shuttle fleet to resume flying as is or develop relatively straight forward repairs that will minimize the down time. Even so, he said the next flight would not get off the ground before September even under the most optimistic scenario. "If I made that decision today, you're talking about early September," he said. In reality, sources say, the earliest a shuttle could be ready to fly is around Sept. 19. NASA hopes to close out the year with three flights. First up was the shuttle Columbia, originally scheduled for launch July 19 on a 16-day microgravity research mission featuring the first Israeli astronaut. Atlantis was next up, with a launch on Aug. 22 to deliver another solar array truss segment to the international space station. NASA planned to close out the year by launching the Endeavour in mid October to deliver another truss segment to the station, along with a fresh three-person crew. The station's current crew - Expedition 5 commander Valeri Korzun, Sergei Treschev and Peggy Whitson - plans to return to Earth aboard Endeavour after four-and-a-half months in space. The first hint that schedule was in trouble came during routine inspections of the shuttle Atlantis on June 17. Engineers discovered a small crack in a liner inside the 12-inch-wide liquid hydrogen feed line leading to main engine No. 1. Two more cracks in the same flow liner were found the next day. Similar cracks then were found aboard Discovery and then Columbia, at which point Dittemore stopped processing for the July flight. Earlier this week, cracks were found in flow liners aboard Endeavour. While only Columbia's flight has been officially delayed at this point, Dittemore said he had no problem calling the fleet "grounded" until the crack issue is resolved. The concern is that if a crack worsened in flight and a piece of debris broke off, it could get sucked into a main engine turbopump at high velocity, triggering a catastrophic failure. Dittemore said today he is not as concerned as he was when the cracks were first discovered and that "it's clear we've been flying with these cracks for some period of time." "My concern from a safety point of view has been diminished because of (tests and analyses) over the past several weeks," Dittemore said. "That's not to say I'm ready to go fly. I still need to understand more about these cracks and I still need to understand more about the potential for these cracks to grow." Until then, he said, "we will not fly." Eleven cracks were found in all, three each aboard Atlantis, Discovery and Columbia and two aboard Endeavour. Seven of the cracks were found in flow liners leading to a shuttle's No. 1 main engine, the one located directly under the ship's vertical stabilizer. The other four cracks were found in liners leading to the No. 2 engine position. Six cracks were circumferential a five were axial. Five were discovered visually, two by ultrasound and four using eddy currents, an electrical test that can find areas of weakness in an alloy. Here's the breakdown (all measurements in tenths of an inch): ORBITER.....DATE FOUND...LOCATION...SIZE..DIRECTION.........INSPECTION Atlantis....06/17/02.....SSME1/LH2 .2"....Circumferential...Visual ............06/18/02.....SSME1/LH2 .2"....Circumferential...Eddy current .........................SSME1/LH2 .2"....Circumferential...Eddy current Discovery...06/24/02.....SSME1/LH2 .15"...Axial.............Visual .........................SSME1/LH2 .20"...Axial.............Eddy current .........................SSME1/LH2 .10"...Axial.............Eddy current Columbia....07/03/02.....SSME2/LH2 .2"....Circumferential...Visual ............07/08/02.....SSME2/LH2 .2"....Circumferential...Ultrasound .........................SSME2/LH2 .2"....Circumferential...Ultrasound Endeavour...07/09/02.....SSME1/LH2 .25"...Axial.............Visual ............07/10/02.....SSME2/LH2 .3"....Axial.............Visual In addition, engineers found a similar crack in a main engine test article used to test fire shuttle engine clusters many years ago at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. "Even though we've found cracks, it's not age related," Dittemore said. "Whether I've flown the vehicle 16 or 17 times or 30 times, the data appear to show the cracks are present and relatively about the same size." He said the cracks could be the result of stress when the flow liners were initially installed or the result of some as-yet-unknown environmental factor that is present when the engines are running and supercold liquid hydrogen is flowing through the lines. But engineers do not believe the cracks have grown significantly since they first developed. Even so, repair techniques are being developed to fix the cracks if engineers are unable to convince themselves it's safe to launch as is. Those techniques include grinding out the cracks, welding them or attaching clamp-like couplers to strengthen a suspect area. Engineers believe any such repairs can be accomplished in place aboard each shuttle, without having to disassemble an orbiter's main propulsion system. "Generally, I'm very optimistic we will be able to develop rationale that either says these cracks are safe to fly as is ... or we will be able to develop a repair technique," Dittemore said. "As soon as we determine that we are ready to proceed and re-install engines, it will take us approximately seven to eight weeks from that decision to launch." But it's not yet clear which flight might be launched first. Dittemore said he plans to begin meeting with his space station counterparts next week to discuss various launch scenarios. Whether Columbia will remain first in line or whether a station flight will be moved up is not yet known. =================================================================== NASA mulls launch options; Columbia slip likely (07/18-19/02) Posted July 19: Shuttle program manager Ronald Dittemore briefed reporters July 19 on the status of NASA's on-going investigation into flow liner cracks across the shuttle fleet. He said three repair options currently are under discussion and that he plans to select one of them for additional study next week. A final engineering meeting is planned for July 31. At that point, Dittemore will either order the selected repair option implemented or clear the shuttles for launch as is. As of today, however, he said he's leaning toward ordering a repair. It is still not known which shuttle will fly first: Atlantis or Columbia. Either vehicle can be ready for launch by Sept. 26. The discussion below, posted July 18, covers several options and possible launch dates based on an engineering review Wednesday. While it does not appear likely Columbia will launch in September, Dittemore emphasized today he has not ruled that option out. A final decision will be based, in part, on which orbiter is easier to repair. Either way, he said, "we're very optimistic we're going to get this thing wrapped up soon." Posted July 18: NASA managers are converging on a repair plan to fix small cracks in space shuttle fuel lines that could lead to a resumption of shuttle flights by late September or early October. During an all-day meeting Wednesday, shuttle managers reviewed repair plans and a variety of possible launch options. While no final decisions were made, the most favored option calls for delaying the shuttle Columbia's flight on a 16-day science mission until at least early December, after two space station assembly flights. Under that scenario, the shuttle Atlantis would take off between Sept. 26 and Oct. 10 to deliver an outboard solar array truss segment to the space station. The shuttle Endeavour, carrying another truss section, would follow suit between Nov. 2 and Nov. 6. Columbia, originally scheduled for liftoff July 19, would slip to no earlier than Dec. 3. But Sept. 26 is a "best case" launch date and it assumes engineers begin re-installing Atlantis' main engines by Aug. 5. That work could easily be delayed depending on the work required to fix the hydrogen flow liner cracks that grounded the shuttle fleet in the first place. While the dates might change, shuttle and station program managers have agreed the upcoming station flights have priority and it now appears unlikely Columbia will launch before either station mission. The launch schedule is complicated by Russian plans to launch a new Soyuz lifeboat to the station Oct. 22. Because of complex mission control issues, a Soyuz cannot be launched until a shuttle flight is back on the ground. That means Atlantis, assuming the current manifest option is finalized, must get off the ground by Oct. 10. The next shuttle launch window opens on Nov. 2 and closes Nov. 6. That's because NASA does not want a shuttle in orbit during the Leonids meteor shower Nov. 19. Even though Endeavour's mission currently is scheduled to last 10 days, NASA always protects against the possibility of bad weather that could keep a crew in orbit an additional two days. For a launch on Nov. 6, that policy would provide landing opportunities through Nov. 18. NASA managers briefly considered the possibility of launching Endeavour before Atlantis, but Endeavour's ground processing cannot moved up. It now appears all but certain Atlantis will fly before Endeavour, although the exact launch dates remain uncertain. Wild cards in all of this include: A possible Soyuz taxi flight delay, either to give N'Synch's Lance Bass more time to train (assuming he finalizes a contract for a seat on the flight) or to process the launch vehicle. An on-time launch Oct. 22 would permit a daylight landing at the end of the 10-day flight. The Russians could, however, waive their daytime landing requirement depending on training or processing issues. In that case, the Soyuz taxi crew could be launched as late as Nov. 1 and still get home in the station's current Soyuz before it reaches its 200-day orbital lifetime limit on Nov. 11. Beta angle cutouts: Station assembly flights cannot be launched during certain periods when the angle between the sun and the plane of the lab's orbit is such that solar power generation is minimized. Just for the record, one such beta angle cutout falls between Oct. 15-24; the next cutout occurs between Dec. 9 and Dec. 25. NASA originally planned to close out the year with three flights: Columbia on July 19; Atlantis on Aug. 22; and Endeavour on Oct. 6. The station's current crew - Expedition 5 commander Valeri Korzun, Sergei Treschev and Peggy Whitson - plans to return to Earth aboard Endeavour after four-and-a-half months in space. But during routine inspections of the shuttle Atlantis on June 17, engineers discovered a small crack in a liner inside the 12-inch-wide liquid hydrogen feed line leading to main engine No. 1. Two more cracks in the same flow liner were found the next day. Similar cracks then were found aboard Discovery and then Columbia, at which point shuttle program manager Ronald Dittemore stopped processing for the July flight. Last week, cracks were found in flow liners aboard Endeavour. The concern is that if a crack worsened, a piece of debris could break off and get sucked into a main engine with possibly catastrophic results. Dittemore stopped Columbia's processing and, in effect, grounded the fleet pending the outcome of an exhaustive engineering analysis. That work continues and engineers have yet to determine the cause of the cracks. But they are converging on a plan to fix them. While some engineers believe the shuttle can be safely launched as is, it now appears likely Dittemore will order repairs. A meeting to make a decision one way or the other is expected before the end of the month. =================================================================== Columbia to leapfrog next two shuttle flights (07/26/02) Confident shuttle fuel line cracks can be fixed, if necessary, by welding, NASA managers are converging on a plan to resume shuttle launches in late September or early October with the first of two back-to-back space station assembly missions. Under that preferred scenario, launch of the shuttle Columbia, originally scheduled for July 19, would slip to around Dec. 3. Shuttle program manager Ronald Dittemore stressed the plan is strictly "preliminary" at this point and that a final program review is planned for July 31. But as of today, it appears NASA will opt to fix the fuel line flow liner cracks found in all four space shuttles using a straight-forward welding technique and that Atlantis will be first off the pad at some point after Sept. 26. The goal of that mission - station assembly flight 9A - is to attach first starboard solar array truss segment to the international space station. The shuttle Endeavour then would follow suit Nov. 2 on assembly flight 11A to deliver the first port-side truss segment, to ferry a fresh three-person crew to the orbital lab complex and to bring the station's current occupants back to Earth. Under this scenario, NASA would close out the year by launching Columbia on a flight featuring the first Israeli astronaut. The shuttle fleet was grounded in June after engineers discovered tiny cracks in an internal fuel line baffle just upstream of main engine No. 1 aboard the shuttle Atlantis. Similar cracks then were found aboard Discovery and then Columbia, at which point Dittemore stopped processing for Columbia's planned July flight. Cracks later were found in flow liners aboard Endeavour. The concern is that if a crack worsened, a piece of debris could break off and get sucked into a main engine with possibly catastrophic results. Dittemore said engineers still don't know what caused the cracks to form in the first place, but exhaustive testing and analysis should clear the way for the safe resumption of flights. "We're still searching for that elusive root cause," he said. "But that's not going to hold us up from returning to flight." Dittemore has not yet ruled out the possibility of resuming shuttle flights without implementing any repairs. But he said today the proposed welding repair is relatively straight forward, easy to carry out and, as of this writing, it is the favored option. He said the cracks in Atlantis' flow liner could be repaired in time to re-install the ship's main engines in time to support a late-September liftoff. =================================================================== Thomas removed from station crew (07/26/02) Astronaut Donald Thomas, a member of the space station's next full-time crew, has been replaced by backup astronaut Donald Pettit because of an undisclosed "medical issue." Pettit and his Expedition 6 crewmates - commander Kenneth Bowersox and cosmonaut Nickolai Budarin - are tentatively scheduled for launch around Nov. 2 aboard the shuttle Endeavour. They will replace the station's current crew, commander Valery Korzun, Sergei Treschev and Peggy Whitson. Thomas was officially named to the Expedition 6 crew March 26, 2001. While an astronaut's removal from a crew is not unprecedented, it is relatively rare. But as a matter of policy, NASA will not discuss any aspects of an astronaut's medical condition and it was not immediately known what led to Thomas' replacement. Here is the text of a NASA statement released this afternoon: RELEASE: 02-139 BACKUP CREW MEMBER ASSIGNED TO EXPEDITION SIX Donald Pettit, Ph.D., a member of the Expedition Six backup crew, will replace Donald Thomas, Ph.D., on the future mission to the International Space Station. Pettit has been training as backup flight engineer for this expedition and will join Expedition Commander Kenneth Bowersox (Capt., USN) and Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin. The reassignment results from a medical issue that affects Thomas' long-duration space flight qualification. "The demanding nature of long-term space flight requires a conservative approach to crew health issues, especially this early in the program," said Astronaut Office Chief, Charlie Precourt. "We have had to make such adjustments before; this again demonstrates the value of training backup space station crewmembers in parallel with the prime crews." NASA selected Pettit in April 1996. He's a chemical engineer and served as a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico before joining the astronaut corps. Selected by NASA in January 1990, Thomas became an astronaut in July 1991. He's a veteran of four space shuttle flights and has logged more than 1,040 hours in space. =================================================================== Weld repair approved; next launch targeted for Sept. 28 (08/01/02) As expected, NASA managers meeting Wednesday to review shuttle fuel line repair options tentatively agreed to implement a welding/polishing technique to fix tiny cracks in hydrogen flow liners just upstream of the orbiter's main engines, sources say. They also agreed on a previously proposed shuttle launch sequence, delaying the shuttle Columbia's 16-day science mission to at least late November, after two back-to-back space station assembly flights Sept. 28 and Nov. 2. A final meeting is planned Friday to officially sign off on the new schedule, but no major changes are expected, according to officials familiar with the discussions. Shuttle program manager Ronald Dittemore plans to brief reporters on the return-to-flight strategy during a news conference Friday. Assuming the repair work goes well, NASA hopes to resume shuttle flights by launching Atlantis Sept. 28 on a mission to deliver the first right-side outboard solar array truss to the international space station. The current processing schedule calls for Atlantis to be moved from its hangar to the Vehicle Assembly Building around Aug. 26. Rollout to the pad is targeted for around Sept. 3. NASA managers originally targeted Sept. 26 for launch, but two days were added to the processing schedule to provide a bit of contingency time in case of problems fixing the cracks or getting the ship's engines intalled. A 10-day Russian Soyuz taxi flight is scheduled for launch Oct. 22 to deliver a fresh lifeboat to the lab complex. The station's current Soyuz will reach its certified 200-day orbital lifetime limit Nov. 11. Because of flight control issues, NASA will not launch a shuttle while a Soyuz mission is underway. Assuming the Soyuz mission gets off on time - and there are indications it could be delayed - NASA hopes to launch the shuttle Endeavour Nov. 2 on a flight to deliver the first left-side outboard solar array truss segment to the laboratory. The currrent processing schedule calls for Endeavour to be moved to the VAB at the end of September and out to the pad around Oct. 7. In recent years, NASA would not allow a shuttle to be in orbit during the Leonids meteor shower, which peaks Nov. 19. That policy would have given NASA just four days or so to get Endeavour off the ground. But agency engineers have re-evaluated that policy and sources say the Leonids restraint likely will be waived this year. Meteor showers aside, NASA is now targeting Nov. 29 as a "no-earlier-than" date for launch of the shuttle Columbia on a microgravity research mission featuring the first Israeli astronaut. If the Soyuz flight ultimately is delayed, Columbia's flight could slip to Jan. 16. The shuttle fleet was grounded earlier this summer, after engineers discovered tiny cracks in internal fuel line baffles in all four of NASA's space shuttles. The concern was that if a crack worsened, a piece of debris could break off and get sucked into a main engine with possibly catastrophic results. While some engineers believe the shuttles can be safely launched as is, NASA management opted to implement a welding repair technique to eliminate any chance the cracks could get worse. =================================================================== Progress, Soyuz, November shuttle flight delayed (08/08/02) Launch of a new Russian Soyuz lifeboat to the international space station has been delayed a week, from Oct. 22 to Oct. 28, triggering a similar slip for a space shuttle flight currently targeted for launch Nov. 2. The Soyuz 5 delivery crew, which includes 'NSynch's Lance Bass, plans to remain aboard the station for 10 days, returning to Earth Nov. 7 aboard the Soyuz 4 vehicle currently docked at the station. In other launch news, an unmanned Russian Progress supply ship, which had been scheduled for launch Sept. 10, has been delayed to Sept. 20. NASA currently is gearing up to launch the shuttle Atlantis around Sept. 28 on a flight to deliver an outboard solar array truss segment to the station. Processing for that flight is running a bit behind schedule because of slower-than-expected work to repair cracks in a hydrogen fuel flow liner leading to main engine No. 1. While Sept. 28 remains the official target date, liftoff likely will slip a few days when all is said and done. NASA had hoped to launch the shuttle Endeavour Nov. 2 on a mission to deliver a second outboard solar array truss segment. But flight rules forbid launching a shuttle while a Soyuz taxi mission is underway, so Endeavour's flight likely will slip to some point after the Soyuz undocks Nov. 7. As of this writing, however, a new target date has not been identified. In the near term, the station's on-board crew - Expedition 5 commander Valery Korzun, Sergei Treschev and Peggy Whitson - is gearing up for two spacewalks Aug. 16 and 23. The first excursion, space station EVA-7, will be carried out by Korzun and Whitson. The three primary tasks of the spacewalk are to A) install the first six of an eventual 17 debris shields on the hull of the Russian Zvezda command module to improve protection against micrometeoroid impacts; B) replace an experiment package "witness plate" bolted to the hull of the module that's designed to collect residue from thruster firings; and C) collect more samples of rocket plume residue on the opposite side of the module from the witness plate. Korzun and Treschev then will stage EVA-8 on Aug. 23. The goals of this excursion are to install two additional ham radio antennas, spacewalk handrails and tether guides on the hull of the station, along with installation of another external experiment package. =================================================================== STS-112 mission preview (09/27/02) After a frustrating summer of work to fix potentially dangerous fuel line cracks, NASA is gearing up to resume shuttle flights Wednesday with launch of the Atlantis on a critical mission to deliver a 14-ton section of the international space station's main solar array truss. Commander Jeffrey Ashby, pilot Pamela Melroy, flight engineer Sandra Magnus, cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and spacewalkers Piers Sellers and David Wolf, a Mir veteran, are scheduled to blast off on the 111th shuttle mission between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. Wednesday. As with all station flights, launch will be timed to coincide with the moment Earth's rotation carries pad 39B into the plane of the target's orbit. But in keeping with NASA's post Sept. 11 security procedures, the exact launch time will not be revealed until 24 hours before liftoff. Whenever Atlantis finally takes off, armchair astronauts will enjoy a spectacular new view of the climb to space from a camera mounted on the side of the shuttle's external tank. Looking down on the orbiter and its twin solid-fuel boosters, the camera will run from launch through external tank separation after Atlantis reaches space. "We're hoping on this flight to get some interesting, new and unique video," said lead flight director Phil Engelauf. "We will for the first time be mounting a public affairs camera on the external tank looking aft down the stack through launch. "That camera will be activated about (15) minutes before launch and should operate through MECO (main engine cutoff) plus about six minutes," he said. "We haven't tried this before, but you've seen these kind of photographs on expendable launches in the past. This will be the first time we've tried it with the shuttle and we've very optimistic about getting some pretty dramatic video going up hill." If all goes well, Ashby will guide Atlantis to a docking with the space station one day 20 hours after launch, between 9:38 a.m. and 1:38 p.m. on Oct. 4. Awaiting their arrival will be Expedition 5 commander Valery Korzun, Sergei Treschev and NASA biochemist Peggy Whitson. The station's fifth full-time crew, Korzun and company were launched to the outpost June 5 aboard the shuttle Endeavour. They are scheduled to return to Earth around Nov. 20 to close out a 167-day voyage. The station has been continuously manned for 691 days as of Sept. 24. The primary goal of Atlantis' flight is to deliver and install the first starboard side - S1 - outboard solar array truss segment, a massive 45-foot-long, 15-foot-wide component massing 28,776 pounds. When completed, the station's nine-segment solar array truss will stretch 330 feet and carry two huge sets of solar panels on each end. Radiators inboard of the solar arrays will dissipate the heat generated by the station's electronic systems. The central element of the truss, a $600 million component known as S0, was attached to the top of the U.S. laboratory module Destiny during a shuttle flight in April. The Boeing-built $390 million S1 segment aboard Atlantis is the first outboard section. A virtually identical segment, known as P1, will be attached to the port, or left side of the central S0 truss during the next shuttle visit in November. S1 is scheduled for attachment to S0 the day after Atlantis docks with the station. Whitson and Magnus, operating the station's Canadarm2 space crane, plan to pull S1 from the shuttle's cargo bay and to carefully position it so a powerful, remotely operated claw at the end of S0 can engage a capture bar on the near end of S1. After the claw pulls the two segments together, motorized bolts at the four corners of the truss interface will drive in to lock the two segments firmly together. While the attachment process is winding up, Wolf and Sellers will exit the station's Quest airlock module for the first of three planned spacewalks to connect electrical cables, ammonia coolant lines and data links between S1 and S0 and to install fittings to prevent fluid line connectors from sticking together. During the first spacewalk, however, Wolf and Sellers will focus on making critical electrical connections and deploying a new S-band antenna. "I think the tasks being performed on these EVAs are comparable to what we've done on other missions," said station flight director Andrew Algate. "Many of the tasks are similar. We're hooking up ammonia QDs (quick-disconnect fittings), which we've done before, we're mating electrical umbilicals, all the tasks we're doing on these EVAs have been done on previous missions." Even so, no one takes the work lightly. "We don't want to cause any damage out there," Wolf said. "We need to be very careful. It's a delicate, in some ways, space station. Lots of antennas, no-touch areas, so we'll be very cognizant of those." S1 and P1 will provide the cooling needed for the space station's electrical systems. The two truss segments each feature three huge folding radiator arrays made up of eight panels each that will extend 75 feet into space to dissipate up to 72,000 watts of heat, enough to cool eight 2,000-square-foot homes. S1 and P1 house independent computers to operate and monitor internal systems, ammonia tanks, pump assemblies and nitrogen pressurization systems for the coolant loops. Each segment features 15 miles of electrical wiring, a third of a mile of fiber optic cabling and 426 feet of stainless steel tubing to route ammonia coolant between the radiators and heat exchangers mounted on S0 and elsewhere. S1 also features an S-band antenna and electronic gear to provide a redundant satellite communications path to the ground, a video system that will aid in future assembly operations and a small cart that future spacewalkers can use to move equipment and tools to different work sites. Heat rejection is provided by two independent ammonia coolant loops. The extendable radiator wings are mounted at right angles to a rectangular framework that can be rotated through 105 degrees to point the radiators toward the cold of deep space. "It's hard to convey in words what we're really doing," said station program manager Bill Gerstenmaier. "The thing that's challenging about this is this is the first time we've ever attached two truss segments together. "Then you have all the connectors and fluid lines that have to be mated between the two truss pieces," he added. "Then there's all the electrical stuff, there are new computers out there that have to interface with the other computers on the station, so we had to get that software synched up. "There's now a thermal rotary joint. This thing rotates and all the ammonia has to flow through this rotating joint (to and from the radiators) and that's a very complex mechanical design. Overall, it's almost mind boggling what we're doing putting this thing together." If all goes well, Atlantis will return to Earth Oct. 13. Two weeks later, on Oct. 28, the Russians plan to launch a fresh Soyuz lifeboat to the lab complex. The two-man taxi crew will return to Earth Nov. 7 aboard the Soyuz currently docked to the station. Soyuz spacecraft are certified for six months in space and they must be periodically replaced. The taxi crew's departure will clear the way for the year's final shuttle mission, launch of Endeavour on Nov. 10 to deliver the P1 solar array truss segment. "I anticipate that there will be a lot of great moments," Ashby said in a NASA interview. "I think the two greatest things for me will be when we dock and first open the hatch and greet our friends that are there on board the space station. I know that's a very, very memorable moment. "And, the second one that I know will be very special is when we undock and start to fly around and look back on the space station with S1 attached and realize that we've successfully completed our little part of the construction of space station." A TRYING SUMMER FOR NASA NASA originally planned to follow the June flight of Endeavour by launching the original shuttle Columbia in July on a 16-day microgravity research mission featuring the first Israeli astronaut. Atlantis was to follow suit Aug. 22 with Endeavour delivering P1 in mid October. But during routine inspections of the shuttle Atlantis on June 17, engineers discovered a small crack in a liner inside the 12-inch-wide liquid hydrogen feed line leading to main engine No. 1. Two more cracks in the same flow liner were found the next day. Similar cracks then were found aboard Discovery and then Columbia, at which point shuttle program manager Ronald Dittemore suspended work to ready Columbia for the July flight. Cracks then were found in flow liners aboard Endeavour and the shuttle fleet was grounded. The concern was that if a crack worsened in flight and a piece of debris broke off, it could get sucked into a main engine turbopump at high velocity, triggering a catastrophic failure. "My concern from a safety point of view has been diminished because of (tests and analyses) over the past several weeks," Dittemore said during a news briefing on July 12. "That's not to say I'm ready to go fly. I still need to understand more about these cracks and I still need to understand more about the potential for these cracks to grow." Until then, he said, "we will not fly." Eleven cracks were found in all, three each aboard Atlantis, Discovery and Columbia and two aboard Endeavour. Seven of the cracks were found in flow liners leading to a shuttle's No. 1 main engine, the one located directly under the ship's vertical stabilizer. The other four cracks were found in liners leading to the No. 2 engine position. Six cracks were circumferential a five were axial. Five were discovered visually, two by ultrasound and four using eddy currents, an electrical test that can find areas of weakness in an alloy. Here's the breakdown (all measurements in tenths of an inch): ORBITER.....DATE FOUND...LOCATION...SIZE..DIRECTION.........INSPECTION Atlantis....06/17/02.....SSME1/LH2 .2"....Circumferential...Visual ............06/18/02.....SSME1/LH2 .2"....Circumferential...Eddy current .........................SSME1/LH2 .2"....Circumferential...Eddy current Discovery...06/24/02.....SSME1/LH2 .15"...Axial.............Visual .........................SSME1/LH2 .20"...Axial.............Eddy current .........................SSME1/LH2 .10"...Axial.............Eddy current Columbia....07/03/02.....SSME2/LH2 .2"....Circumferential...Visual ............07/08/02.....SSME2/LH2 .2"....Circumferential...Ultrasound .........................SSME2/LH2 .2"....Circumferential...Ultrasound Endeavour...07/09/02.....SSME1/LH2 .25"...Axial.............Visual ............07/10/02.....SSME2/LH2 .3"....Axial.............Visual In addition, engineers found a similar crack in a main engine test article used to test fire shuttle engine clusters many years ago at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. "Even though we've found cracks, it's not age related," Dittemore said. "Whether I've flown the vehicle 16 or 17 times or 30 times, the data appear to show the cracks are present and relatively about the same size." He said the cracks could be the result of stress when the flow liners were initially installed or the result of some as-yet-unknown environmental factor that is present when the engines are running and supercold liquid hydrogen is flowing through the lines. In the end, Dittemore approved a plan to repair the cracks using a welding technique and to polish out tiny defects that could evolve into cracks over time. The weld repair was approved during a meeting Aug. 1. At another meeting two days later, Dittemore formally approved a revised shuttle launch schedule that called for launching Atlantis Sept. 28 and Endeavour around Nov. 2. Columbia's microgravity research flight ultimately slipped to mid January while Atlantis was delayed to Oct. 2 because of problems with NASA's crawler transporters used to haul shuttles from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pad. "From the operational standpoint, ascent will look just as it always has," Engelauf said of Atlantis' repaired flow liners. "We haven't changed the instrumentation of the vehicle in any way, shape or form. (But) I think from an engineering standpoint, there will be an increased amount of attention on engine performance and post-flight inspections." For their part Ashby and Melroy had nothing but praise for the way NASA handled the fuel liner crack issue. "I personally was very impressed with the way NASA approached it, with very little pressure to get back on a launch schedule, but giving the crew, the team that worked it, plenty of time to properly work through the fault analysis, to decide what had happened and where to go from there," Ashby said. "From what I saw, it was a very professionally completed process and I feel very comfortable that we're better than we were a few months ago as far as those engines." Said Melroy, who flew to the Cape at one point to meet the welders: "They were unbelievably professional. ... Those people really know what they're doing." RENDEZVOUS AND DOCKING The international space station currently is made up of four main habitable modules and two airlock modules - one Russian and one American. Think of the four main modules as a train moving through space. The U.S. laboratory module Destiny is in front, followed by a multi-hatch node called Unity that serves as a gateway to the Russian segment of the outpost. Connected to the node on the opposite side from Destiny is a pressurized mating adapter, or PMA, leading into the Russian-built NASA-financed Zarya propulsion and storage module. Zarya, in turn, is connected to the Zvezda command module. The Russian Pirs docking and airlock module is attached to Zvezda's downward-facing, or nadir, port. Russian Progress supply ships typically dock at Zvezda's aft port while Soyuz lifeboats can be docked at Pirs or a nadir port on the Zarya module. When Atlantis arrives, the Progress 9 cargo ship will be docked to Zvezda's aft port while the current Soyuz lifeboat will be docked to Zarya's nadir port. Facing forward, the U.S. Quest airlock module is attached to Unity's right-side, or starboard, hatch. The Z1 truss, containing the lab's four massive U.S.-built gyroscopes, is bolted to Unity's upward-facing, or zenith, port. Mounted on top of Z1 is the P6 solar array, a huge set of electricity producing panels that ultimately will be moved to the port side of the solar array truss currently under construction. The P6 array truss also includes a thermal control system to provide cooling until the main truss is completed. The solar wings stretch 240 feet from tip to tip, towering 90 feet above the main body of the station. Atlantis's launching, like all flights to the space station, is timed to coincide with the moment Earth's rotation carries the launch pad into the plane of the station's orbit. That plane is tilted 51.6 degrees to Earth's equator. The shuttle has enough power to launch five minutes to either side of the moment the pad is "in plane" with the station. For technical reasons, NASA only uses five minutes of that 10-minute launch window, taking off when the pad is essentially directly in the plane of the station's orbit. Once in space, the plane of the shuttle's orbit cannot be significantly altered. Altitude, however, is another matter and the lower the altitude, the higher the spacecraft's velocity. Atlantis will launch into the station's plane but orbit at an initially lower altitude. After a series of rocket firings to fine-tune the shuttle's approach, Ashby will begin the terminal phase of the rendezvous with Atlantis trailing the station by about 9.2 statute miles. From there, Ashby and Melroy will oversee a series of computer-controlled rocket firings designed to place the shuttle at a point 600 feet or so directly below the space station. At about that point, Ashby will take over manual control and pilot Atlantis in a slow loop up to a point 300 to 400 feet directly in front of the lab complex as both spacecraft race through space at five miles per second. Positioned directly in front of the station's long axis, Ashby will manually guide Atlantis in so the docking system in the shuttle's cargo bay can mate with its counterpart on a pressurized mating adapter attached to Destiny's forward hatch. After hooks and latches engage, the two spacecraft will be locked together. In pre-flight NASA interviews, Ashby did not discuss the terminal rendezvous sequence. But Kenneth Cockrell, Endeavour's commander for NASA's most recent shuttle flight in June, provided a good description of the final series of steps. "It's really a fun piloting task," Cockrell said. "It's like driving a ship. You make very small inputs that take a long time to occur; but once they occur, they're very hard to stop. So it's something you need to do very precisely and it takes a lot of practice. "So we go in very slowly and gradually, we slow down at about 30 feet away from the docking port and just look through a zoomed-in camera at the target. The target has a little set of alignment guides on it and we make sure that we're all lined up, that the two vehicles are exactly in plane. "And then, from 30 feet in, we just hold a steady rate and we crash into the station," he joked. "That's a very slow crash. It's one-tenth of a foot per second. It's as slow as a snail would crawl." After leak checks, hatches between the two spacecraft will be opened and station commander Korzun and his two Expedition 5 crewmates will welcome Atlantis' six astronauts on board. After a safety briefing, the combined crews will get down to work. Along with installing the S1 truss, the shuttle crew plans to deliver about 1,000 pounds of supplies and equipment, along with a few tasty treats for the station's crew. "They're looking forward to getting some apples and oranges and things of that nature," Magnus said at a pre-flight briefing. "There's a pecan pie that we're trying to get up there to them. But that's a secret, don't let them know, that's going to be a surprise!" INSTALLING THE S1 TRUSS The day after docking - flight day four - the combined crews will face the busiest day of Atlantis' mission: Installation of the S1 truss and, during a planned six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk by Wolf and Sellers, initial connection of the electrical cables and data lines needed to bring the truss to life. Three spacewalks will be required to complete the job. "We're going to go out three times and in rough order of importance what we're going to try and do is to make all the electrical connections between the new piece of the station we're putting on there, the truss, and the existing station," said Sellers. "And this is to keep all the heaters alive and the brains of the new components alive, the electrical power. "The next thing we're going to do is put a new comm device on there, which will be used for communications between the crew and the station," he said. "Next important is fluid connections, we want to make the coolant loops that exist on station connect with the cooling radiators that are on the S1 truss. And the fourth thing that, I think, is going to be fun is to activate the CETA cart, which is this little railway cart that trundles up and down the front face of S1." The truss completely fills Atlantis' cargo bay and it is a marvel of complexity. "The electrical utilities consist of 22 different types of wire, totaling 79,241 feet, or 15 miles of wire," said Ronald Torcivia, STS-112 launch package manager. "Another way to look at it is to say that for every foot of the 45-foot-long truss there is a third of a mile of wire. The electrical system has 103 separate harnesses with 8,020 contacts housed in 718 connections. "In addition, there is over a third of a mile of fiber optic cable used to carry video information. The fluid system provides all the utilities needed to transfer ammonia and nitrogen within the thermal control system as well as transferring it to the adjoining structures. "The fluid system consists of 426 feet of rigid stainless steel tubing terminating in 59 EVA-operable connections, or QDs (quick-disconnect fittings)," Torcivia said. "Fifty six of these QDs are used to transfer ammonia while three are used to transfer nitrogen. The ammonia lines are used for cooling and the nitrogen lines are used to maintain pressure within the ammonia system at 3,000 psi. Throw in the complex rotary joint that allows the radiators to be properly oriented, the S-band antenna system, the CETA cart and the segment's computer system and even the casual observer begins to realize the truss is more than a simple, if massive, structural element. "S1 is essentially a full spacecraft," said Gerstenmaier. "The only thing it's lacking is propulsion and some attitude control determination. It has computers on board, multiplexers and de-multiplexers, it has a communications antenna system, it has integral thermal control system, it has radiators, a very large ammonia tank, a crew translation aid. It's a very, very complex spacecraft." While Wolf and Sellers, assisted by Melroy, begin preparations for their first spacewalk, Whitson and Magnus will use the station's robot arm to slowly lift S1 from Atlantis' cargo bay. Ashby will assist by positioning the shuttle's robot arm to provide different television views of the operation. "This is a major transition in the assembly sequence of the station," said Melroy. "At the beginning, the work area was all very close to the shuttle. It was a pretty small station. We were attached to it. We could use the shuttle robotic arm, which, by the way, we have a lot of experience on and feel very comfortable using. We could do all of our assembly tasks very close to the shuttle. "Well, we're moving into a situation now, and the S1 truss is a classic example of it, it's way too far out there! It's on the other side of the shuttle from the robotic arm. There's just no way you can get it over there. So, we've transitioned to using the station arm for the assembly task. Reaching into the payload bay, pulling the S1 truss out, and putting it into position." The truss will be pulled straight up from the payload bay and then maneuvered over the starboard side of the orbiter until it is roughly lined up with S0. Canadarm2 will carefully position S1 so that its capture bar is within reach of the motorized claw at the end of S0. "When we bring S1 into the proper area of that claw, we have sensors around the truss that tell the system that we're in the proper position to begin latching," Torcivia said. "This claw begins to close and it pulls the two trusses together. Once they're together, we have a system called a bus bolt controller and they're located at the four corners of the truss. They are electrically driven screws that drive the structure together. And they can exert anywhere from 8,000 to 16,000 pounds of force on each corner." Wolf and Sellers will be cleared to exit the Quest airlock module once the initial attachment procedure is complete. But they could exit early if there are problems getting S0 and S1 connected. "If there's a problem lining things up, Dave and I will go out there and help guide things in," Sellers said. "Then, if the motorized bolts don't work that tie the new truss to the station, Dave and I have a pocket full of bolts to manually put in there and tie the two together." In a worst case scenario, Wolf and Sellers could use retention straps to ratchet the two truss segments together. "We're trying to make sure if everything else fails, we still have a way to do the primary objective, which is installing this thing," Ashby said. "Providing the station arm is working well enough to at least get it up close, then we can install this thing." But assuming no such problems develop, Wolf and Sellers will begin their excursion after S1 has been bolted to S0. The primary goal of the first spacewalk is to hook up electrical connectors between S1 and S0 to route power into the new truss segment. The connectors are located in two utility trays, one on the upward, or zenith, side of S1 and the other on the nadir side. One tray has seven connectors and the other, eight. The astronauts will begin with the zenith tray. "The crew starts out by connecting up the first set of power and data umbilicals to the S1 truss segment," said Algate. "After that's complete, they'll be getting the S-band antenna from its stowed location and installing it on the truss and hooking up its power and data cables. Once this system is up and connected, a little later in the mission we'll be testing out this second string of communications gear." While Wolf and Sellers are working through their initial tasks, ground controllers will begin powering up internal truss systems, activating its computers and turning on critical heaters. The spacewalkers then will unlatch launch locks that held the CETA cart firmly in place during Atlantis' climb to space. CETA is NASA-ese for "crew EVA translation aid." "We know that there are going to be times when things break down," Melroy said in a NASA interview. "They do, just like they do in your house. So, you have to go out and you have to replace parts. And to do that, you have to do spacewalks. ... The designers of the station took this into consideration, and what's neat is there's this little railroad cart that runs along the bottom of the truss. And, it goes all the way out, in both directions. "(It) kind of makes me think of one of those little railroad carts that you kind of see them in TV and cartoons. But in fact what the crew will do is they pull themselves along hand-over-hand with their feet stuck in the cart, and that's how they move it from place to place. So, this cart will be a part of the, we're taking up one of these carts on the S1 truss, and we'll be basically getting it ready. "It's cinched down, bolted down very tightly for launch," Melroy said. "You don't want this thing wiggling around or moving. So, the EVA crew will go outside. They will take all these bolts out. They will set the parking brake. They're going to practice moving it back and forth. It's the first time we've used it. We're very excited about it!" After releasing launch locks holding the rotating radiator array framework in place, Wolf and Sellers plan to close out the first spacewalk by hooking up the second set of power and data umbilicals located in the nadir utility tray. Until both sets are connected, the truss is not considered in a safe configuration. The spacewalkers also will mount a video camera on one of the keel assemblies that held S1 in the shuttle's cargo bay. "There are two levels of difficulty to consider," Sellers said before launch. "One is the complexity of the task, the thing you're trying to do, and that's where Pam keeps us straight. She has the checklist, she knows where we're going and exactly what connects to what. "The other level of difficulty has to do with can I get my arm, which is incased in this thick, heavy (spacesuit), into a place to do a connection or to throw a lever on a bale or something like that? Those things we've practiced in the pool, endlessly, and I think we're very well prepared for those, too. So in both cases, after a lot of effort by our training team and the people who supported us, I think we're ready." The next day, flight day five, the astronauts will enjoy a bit of time off and begin transferring supplies and equipment from the shuttle's middeck to the station. Along the way, they'll review plans for the second spacewalk the next day. PLUGGING POTENTIAL LEAKS The primary goals of the second spacewalk are to: -Install a video camera on the hull of the Unity node; -Connect fluid lines leading to the S1's ammonia tank assembly; the truss has two tanks, each loaded with about 300 pounds of ammonia. Connecting these lines will permit ground controllers to run ammonia through the coolant system when it is activated next year; -Finish removing launch locks holding the CETA cart in place; -Install 25 of 31 "spool positioning devices," or SPDs, on all of the ammonia line quick-disconnect fittings currently aboard the station as well as the ones that will be used to connect ammonia lines between S1 and S0. The goal is to prevent potentially crippling problems on future assembly missions. "What we determined in ground testing is that there are two seals in the fluid QDs," said lead spacewalk planner Oscar Koehler. "You can get a build-up of pressure between those QDs because if one of the seals leaks, the other seal will stop that fluid and you'll build up a pressure in there. You have to have a certain number of thermal cycles to raise that pressure to a level where it will basically lock up the QD so when you come to do maintenance later on, you can't get that QD off. "So the work around is to basically take one of those seals out of the loop so if you have a leak - and we're talking very small leaks - you just leak past the other seal, you won't build up that pressure so when we come back to do maintenance, you can get the QD off." The SPDs Wolf and Sellers will attach to each quick-disconnect fitting lock the handle, or bale, used to draw the two sides of a connector together so that only one of the internal seals can engage. "They position the bale, the handle, so the valve is partly open and it's only open enough to take one of those seals out," Koehler said. Additional SPDs will be installed on the next two shuttle missions to protect all of the station's planned coolant line quick-disconnect fittings. For this flight, 24 one-inch-wide SPDs will be installed, six 1.5-inch SPDs and one 0.5-inch SPD. All but two will be installed during the second spacewalk with the final pair installed during the crew's third excursion. The work is important because successfully separating ammonia quick-disconnect fittings could be critical in the event of a future failure. "If at some point we have a radiator leak or we have a radiator get damaged, we can actually remove that radiator and replace it with a new one," Koehler said. "And the QD is what allows you to disconnect your fluid lines from that ORU. Almost all the ORUs that have ammonia going to them outside have the same type of QDs." Ammonia will not flow through S1's thermal control system until a later mission. But six QDs connecting coolant lines running between the Destiny lab module and the station's current radiators on the P6 solar array atop the Z1 truss are pressurized with ammonia. If Wolf and Sellers have any problems installing SPDs on these connectors, they will simply press on with other tasks and astronauts on a future assembly mission will use a special tool to pry any stuck QDs apart as required. Because of the possibility of a leak, both spacewalkers have practiced procedures to remove any residue of the chemical before re-entering the space station. "Ammonia is the primary external coolant in the coolant loops of the space station and there is the potential for it to escape in the various operations we do," Wolf said. "First of all, it is not dangerous immediately to the space suit. The spacesuit can tolerate large amounts of ammonia. We don't want to contaminate the internal atmosphere, of course, when we come in. So it will sublimate or bake off. "We try to get out in the sun first of all. We try to do those tasks early in the EVA so if we get contaminated there will be more time for it to bake off into the vacuum. We have some special brushes to brush it off. We even have detection techniques in the airlock." If any residue is suspected, the astronauts will partially repressurize the airlock, take an air sample, and if necessary, depressurize the airlock again to allow additional time to bake out the chemical. RADIATOR DEPLOY, TREADMILL REPAIR AND A FINAL SPACEWALK On flight day seven, the day after EVA-2, the astronauts will take another break of sorts, continuing work to transfer equipment from Atlantis to the space station and preparing for the mission's third and final spacewalk the next day. Korzun and his station crewmates plan to spend most of the day replacing components in the Zvezda module's U.S.-built treadmill while their shuttle crewmates test S1's radiator array. While no ammonia will flow through the system until next year, engineers want to make sure the framework all three radiator arrays are mounted on can, in fact, rotate as required to point them toward deep space. To make sure the wings can unfold as required, the station crew will send commands to fire six pyrotechnic squibs holding the folded central set of radiator panels in place. A motor then will drive the wing open. If the panels don't unfurl for some reason, Wolf and Sellers can crank them open with a power tool during the final spacewalk. "We're actually going to deploy just the center of the three, just to make sure that everything is working okay," Melroy said in a NASA interview. "We're going to get a little bit of a jump on things to do that. So, we're excited about seeing that radiator unfurl out into space. I think that'll be really neat and exciting. It's a bunch of folding panels. It's almost like folding a paper doll out. It's going to look really neat." Only one wing is being extended during Atlantis' mission because A) the station doesn't currently need any additional heat rejection; B) engineers don't want to expose the panels to possible micrometeoroid damage any earlier than necessary; and C) there is an interference issue with solar arrays on the Zarya module. Zarya's arrays will be retracted after installation of additional Russian solar arrays later in the assembly sequence, eliminating the interference problem. But for now, they're in the way. The third and final spacewalk of mission STS-112 is scheduled for flight day eight. The excursion has four primary objectives: -Connection of ammonia jumpers between S0 and S1; -Removal of two keel pin assemblies that were used to help hold S1 in the shuttle's cargo bay; -Installation of six final SPDs; -Repair or replacement, if necessary, of a cable cutter on Canadarm2's mobile base system, which carries the crane back and forth along the solar array truss. Independent spool-fed power and video lines play out as required as the mobile base system cart moves along, providing power between work stations. Should a spool jam when the cart is between work stations, cable cutters are in place to cut the stuck line. That would allow the cart and the robot arm to reach the next work station where the cart could plug into a power socket. During installation of S0 in April, a safing bolt in one of the "interface umbilical assemblies," used to prevent inadvertent activation of a cable cutter during launch, failed to back out when spacewalkers attempted to remove it. Both of the cable cutters must be operational to complete assembly of the truss. "If you're moving the mobile transporter and it gets stuck between work sites, cutting the cable allows you to move to the next worksite," said Koehler. "There are different failures that can cause that cable to jam in its reel. The other one would still be reeling out. So you cut the one cable, use the other one to give you power to get out to your next work site to plug in. It gives you the power you need to keep the mobile transporter alive." Wolf and Sellers plan to use a much higher torque setting to free the stuck bolt and if that doesn't work, they will replace the entire umbilical assembly. That job, should it be necessary, would take about an hour and a half to complete. "Whenever you're out doing a spacewalk, it's a critical environment," Wolf said. "It is very unforgiving so any tasks conducted in the spacesuit at vacuum are critical and are difficult. It's a big heavy suit, it's like wearing ski mittens and doing fairly delicate work. And so we've developed special techniques and special tools to accomplish that. "Having said that, we have developed these tasks in a manner where the 10 to 15 tasks we're doing are of similar difficulty. I'd say putting on the interface umbilical assembly, which is under the mobile base system, is one of our more difficult tasks procedurally." UNDOCKING, RE-ENTRY AND LANDING With the spacewalks complete, the combined shuttle-station crew plan to take time off on flight day 10, to complete logistics transfer operations and to transfer spacesuits and other hardware back to the shuttle for return to earth. "Sandy Magnus is our transfer queen," said Melroy. "She is very detail oriented and very organized. And so, she's going to help us. She's going to be the general on transfer days. She carries all this in her head." The next day, flight day 11, Atlantis will undock from the international space station, following a now-standard departure profile. With Melroy at the controls, the shuttle will back away to a point about 450 feet directly in front of the station. Melroy then will guide Atlantis through a fly-around of the station for routine photo documentation before departing the area for good. The space station will have an unusually asymmetric appearance as the shuttle pulls away, with the S1 truss sticking 45 out to one side. The station maintains its orientation in space using control moment gyroscopes in the Z1 truss. Despite the unbalanced load represented by the S1 truss, the CMGs should have no problem compensating. "As we build up the truss segment, we kind of have a back-and-forth situation where the truss is balanced and unbalanced," Algate said. "It is a bit more difficult to control, but our momentum management system with our control moment gyros can deal with that." Likewise, the unbalanced load will cause no major impacts to routine procedures in which the shuttle's maneuvering jets are used to reboost the station's altitude. Two such reboost maneuvers are planned during Atlantis' mission, one on flight day five and one on flight day seven. "On the shuttle side, looking at shuttle reboost, they did find some asymmetry in the jet firings and some of the jets get a little warmer because of the asymmetrical thrusts," Algate said. "As a result of that, in some of the reboost modes we had to cut back the maximum duration that we could do a shuttle reboost. As it turns out, for the reboost modes we're planning to use on this mission it won't have an impact." The day after undocking, the astronauts will work through a standard pre-entry timeline, stowing equipment, testing the shuttle's entry systems and gearing up for the fiery plunge back to Earth. "After we've undocked, we have the normal shuttle entry preparation activities, but in addition we have a secondary payload on this flight called SHIMMER," Engelauf said. "I confess, I even have to look up the name of this particular payload. It stands for 'Spatial Heterodyne Imager for Mesospheric Radicals.' It's an Air Force-sponsored payload that requires a little bit of out-the-window pointing for the shuttle to take some spectral images. "This payload is essentially a demonstration of a new remote sensing technique using ultraviolet wavelengths in mapping hydroxyl in density distributions, which would be useful mapping the ozone layer and the chemical hydroxyl, which is largely responsible for the breakdown ozone." If all goes well, Ashby and Melroy will fire Atlantis' twin orbital maneuvering system braking rockets and glide to an afternoon landing at the Kennedy Space Center on Oct. 13 to close out an 11-day mission spanning 170 orbits and 4.5 million miles. The next two shuttle flights are critical to the continued assembly of the space station. But the work is relatively straight forward. Next year, however, "when we start bringing up the outboard solar arrays, that's where things are going to get very, very challenging for us," Gerstenmaier said. "When we get to the 2003 timeframe, we're not only doing assembly, we're doing reconfiguration," he said. "That's new for us. And by reconfiguration, we're going to pull a radiator off of P6 and it's going to be moved outboard to one of the solar arrays and attached out there. We're going to also fold up the entire P6 solar arrays and then move them out on the mobile transporter and attach them out on the end of the truss. "Those are major activities in terms of reconfiguration, those have a lot more uncertainty in them because the hardware's been up and operating in orbit, it's not flying in a pristine condition, it's got some runtime on it, we're going to be operating out quick-disconnects and doing those things. So that's a new series of challenges for us that we're really got to stay focused on. "The other thing that happens in that timeframe is we go from our power system now, which is essentially P6 providing us power, to where we're going to get the permanent power system," Gerstenmaier said. "It's a full two-string power system, full two-string communications system, full two-string thermal system. A lot of those systems right now are single string systems. So we have to shut off our power system and then bring up our new power system, our new thermal system, our new communications system. That also concerns me, because that's a very critical activity." =================================================================== Atlantis set for trip to pad, 10/2 launch (09/09/02) The shuttle Atlantis is being readied for its delayed trip to the launch pad and blastoff Oct. 2, between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m., in a flight to the international space station. The goal of the 111th shuttle mission is to deliver the first outboard segment of the station's huge solar array truss. The central element - S0 - of the truss currently is in place, anchored to the zenith side of the U.S. laboratory module Destiny. Atlantis' six-member crew will deliver the first starboard truss segment and stage three spacewalks to connect electrical cables and cooling system fluid lines between S0 and S1. The first port-side segment is scheduled for launch aboard the shuttle Endeavour in November. As of today, the international space station has been continuously staffed by rotating three-person crews for 676 days. Expedition 5 commander Valery Korzun, Peggy Whitson and Sergei Treschev were launched to the outpost June 5. As of today, they have been off planet for 96 days. They are scheduled to return to Earth in November aboard the shuttle Endeavour after 165 days in space. In the meantime, Korzun and company are gearing up for a busy two months in orbit. On Sept. 24, at 9:57 a.m., the Progress 8 supply ship, now loaded with trash and no-longer-needed equipment, will be jettisoned. The next day, at 12:58 p.m., the Russians plan to launch the Progress 9 supply ship from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The unmanned vehicle is scheduled to dock at 1:07 p.m. on Sept. 29, the same day the STS-112 countdown is scheduled to begin. Following Atlantis' mission, the Expedition 5 crew will accept delivery of a fresh Soyuz lifeboat from a two-man taxi crew made up of commander Sergei Zalyotin and Belgian astronaut Frank DeWinne. 'N Synch's Lance Bass had hoped to be a member of the taxi crew, but his backers were unable to come up with the $20 million charged by the Russians for a seat on a Soyuz. Zalyotin and DeWinne are scheduled for launch Oct. 28. If all goes well, they will undock and return to Earth Nov. 7 in the station's current Soyuz, which is nearing the end of its certified lifetime. A detailed STS-112 mission overview will be posted here as soon as possible. In the meantime, we will post more frequent updates to keep readers abreast of the latest launch processing milestones. Mission personnel, hardware assignments, links to crew bios and other data are posted below. Earlier status reports can be found in the STS-112 Reporter's Notebook. =================================================================== NASA tracks potential threats from Isidore, Lili (09/24/02) An unmanned Progress supply ship, loaded with some 3,300 pounds of trash and no-longer-needed equipment, undocked from the international space station today at 9:59 a.m. EDT to make way for arrival of a fresh Progress vehicle scheduled for launch Wednesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. If all goes well, the Progress 9 spacecraft will glide to an automated docking with the station at the aft port of the Russian Zvezda command module Monday afternoon. It is loaded with some 5,500 of supplies and equipment needed by the station's current and future crews. NASA managers, meanwhile, are monitoring the progress of two storm systems that could impact plans to launch the shuttle Atlantis next Wednesday on the next space station assembly mission. While the threat to the Johnson Space Center from Isidore in the Gulf of Mexico has lessened in recent hours - the storm's current track would carry it to landfall in Louisiana - agency managers are closely monitoring the progress of tropical storm Lili in the southern Caribbean. The storm could strengthen to hurricane force within a few days and its current path suggests a possible track up the eastern coast of Florida. Readers are encouraged to check with the National Hurricane Center in Miami for updates. With Atlantis mounted atop pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA managers could be forced to consider moving the shuttle back to the protection of the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building if Lili's track eventually threatens the Cape Canaveral area. The National Hurricane Center has not yet listed strike possibilities for any points in Florida, but NASA does not have the luxury of waiting until the last minute to make a rollback decision. It takes between 40 and 48 hours to ready a shuttle from the six-and-a-half-hour trip from the pad to the VAB from the point a decision to roll is made. Atlantis' countdown is scheduled to start late this weekend for a launch Wednesday between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. According to the National Hurricane Center, Lili is expected to be positioned over the eastern tip of Cuba by 2 a.m. Friday. if its track doesn't change, the storm could be affecting points along the southern to central coast of Florida by the time Atlantis' countdown is scheduled to begin. A rollback would delay launch, but it's much too early to to know how this one might play out. Stay tuned! Weather links of interest: National Hurricane Center Lily Graphics Isidore Graphics Spaceflight Meteorology Group SMG Shuttle Launch/Landing Forecasts SMG Imagery and Radar Kennedy Space Center Weather 1-kilometer Florida Visible Image Florida Infrared Image Kennedy Space Center Forecast Melbourne Radar GOES Satellite Imagery =================================================================== Unmanned Progress supply ship docks with station (09/29/02) An unmanned Progress supply ship docked with the international space station today as NASA engineers in Florida prepared to start the shuttle Atlantis' countdown to blastoff Wednesday on a space station assembly mission. The Progress M1-9 spacecraft docked at the aft port of the Zvezda command module at 1:01 p.m. EDT after an uneventful, automated rendezvous that began with blastoff Wednesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Under a post Sept. 11 security policy, NASA will not say when the shuttle Atlantis' countdown is scheduled to begin. But given the already announced launch period of 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday, the countdown is expected to start later this evening. A NASA countdown status briefing is planned for 9 a.m. Monday followed by a pre-launch news conference at 4 p.m. =================================================================== Shuttle countdown begins (09/30/02) The shuttle Atlantis' countdown is ticking toward a launch attempt Wednesday between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. Under NASA's post-September 11 security policy, the exact launch time will not be announced until 24 hours before liftoff. Likewise, the agency would not say in advance when the countdown began, but it is believed to have started Sunday evening. NASA test director Jeffrey Spaulding said this morning the countdown is proceeding smoothly and there are no technical problems of any significance at pad 39B. "I'm pleased to be back here today to report the STS-112 launch countdown has begun and things are proceeding very well," Spaulding said. "The shuttle Atlantis is in excellent shape as we continue preparations for Wednesday's launch." The weather is another issue, of course, and forecasters are predicting a 40 percent chance of isolated showers that could delay launch Wednesday. If launch is delayed, the odds improve to 70 percent "go" Thursday and 80 percent go Friday. Atlantis has enough on-board supplies to make four launch attempts over five days. The Atlantis astronauts flew to the Kennedy Space Center Sunday to prepare for launch. A pre-launch briefing with shuttle program managers is scheduled for 4 p.m. today. A detailed 7,000-word mission overview is available in the STS-112 Mission Archive. "It has been a while since we've been in launch countdown," Spaulding said, referring to the shuttle's fleet's grounding earlier this summer. "The systems on the vehicle look great and the launch team is ready to go." =================================================================== Hurricane Lili threatens mission control (09/30/02) If Hurricane Lili continues on its projected course and becomes a real threat to the area, launch of the shuttle Atlantis Wednesday will be delayed a few days, shuttle program manager Ronald Dittemore said today. "It's a little discouraging to get yourself this far, to get ready for launch and have good weather, basically, in Florida and then find out you have this threat on the Gulf Coast that may cause you to stand down a little bit," Dittemore said. "But there's no rush for us to get focused in on the launch when there are a lot of other things that may cause people to focus on personal and family situations. We're just going to have to wait, we're going to have to watch." The forecast for Florida calls for a 60 percent chance of acceptable weather during Atlantis' 2 p.m.-to-6 p.m. launch window Wednesday. The odds improve to 70 percent "go" Thursday and 80 percent go Friday. There are no technical problems of any significance. But the latest forecast from the National Hurricane Center shows Hurricane Lili on a course that would carry it to landfall just east of and the Johnson Space Center. "We have a lot of concern with that. That's going to be the challenge Mother Nature's going to throw at us this time around," Dittemore said today at a pre-launch news briefing. "We need the weather to be good here in Florida for launch and we also need the weather to be stable in so we don't have the threat of an evacuation of the Johnson Space Center or the mission control center. "As you know, all control and communication with the space flight reverts over to the Johnson Space Center and the mission control center as soon as the motors ignite," he said. "We do not have redundant capabilities between the control centers." While shuttle flight controllers could monitor a mission using the launch processing system computers at the Kennedy Space Center, they could not carry out a rendezvous and docking with the international space station. The goal of Atlantis' mission is to deliver and install an outboard segment of the space station's main solar array truss. Rendezvous and docking obviously are required, along with three spacewalks by astronauts David Wolf and Piers Sellers. Space station flight controllers could oversee U.S. station operations from NASA facilities at a Russian mission control center near Moscow, but they would not be able to orchestrate the planned spacewalks. "With that hurricane threatening the Gulf Coast, we're going to be conservative and we would not entertain launching until we were sure that hurricane does not present a threat to our mission control center in ," Dittemore said. "There's a lot of uncertainty with projections about where these storms will go. I don't think tomorrow we'll have a lot more information that would help us decide. It's likely we're going to go right on down to the tanking meeting and decide whether we have enough information to be confident one way or the other." While the details of Atlantis' launch-day countdown will not be released until the launch time is announced 24 hours before liftoff, fueling is expected to begin early Wednesday morning. NASA's mission management team will meet before fueling is scheduled to begin to assess the weather and the status of Atlantis and its systems before giving formal permission to continue the countdown. "If we're not confident that we can predict the storm will be at a certain place to protect our assets and our people, then at the tanking meeting we'll choose not to tank," Dittemore said. "We're also concerned about making sure the folks down here that are here from for a period of days are not focused on the storm and families while we want to go launch. We don't want to put them in that position. So we would elect not to proceed with launch operations until that scenario is past and there is no concern with their families back at home." He said "It is likely" that if the storm continues on its present course "that we'll send all the folks home, back to , so they can take care of their immediate needs in the local area and make sure their families are safe. And when that issue is past, we'll look up again and determine when we're going to begin launch operations." Launch managers plan to meet Tuesday afternoon at 2 p.m. to continue assessing the weather, Lili's track and what might be required to get the 30 or so on-site Johnson Space Center workers back to their homes in , if necessary, before the hurricane might prevent travel. "It would be wonderful if it would just spin itself out and disappear," Dittemore said. "But that's not likely." =================================================================== Shuttle launch delayed by hurrican threat to JSC (10/01/02) 03:15 p.m., 10/01/02, Update: Shuttle launch delayed; ISS crew prepares for possible mission control evacuation (updated at 5:15 p.m.) With Hurricane Lili bearing down on the Louisiana-Texas coastline, NASA managers today decided to delay the planned launching of the shuttle Atlantis Wednesday to give workers at the Johnson Space Center near time to prepare for severe weather - and possibly evacuate mission control. The 111th shuttle launch, which had been scheduled between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. Wednesday, will be delayed at least 24 hours and possibly longer depending on Lili's eventual path, shuttle program managers decided late this afternoon. Flight controllers radioed the international space station's crew shortly before 5 p.m. and said it was "more than likely" the Johnson Space Center would have to be evacuated. If that scenario actually plays out, the crew was told, the station's solar arrays would be locked in place, reducing the available power to the station, to eliminate any chance of problems that might crop out while flight controllers were not actively monitoring critical systems. The reduced power, in turn, likely would force the crew to turn off lights in the outpost and air circulation systems in the Quest airlock module. Flight controllers said the crew would be able to communicate with NASA engineers at a Russian flight control center near Moscow. In the event JSC is, in fact, evaculated, UHF communications systems in California and Virginia would be activated to improve contact with the ground. The astronauts would have to manually control the station's stabilizing gyroscopes and possibly oversee a rocket firing by an attached Progress supply ship to boost the lab's altitude. "The intention, however, is to generally still operate the vehicle from the backup mission control center in Moscow during the possible evaculation period," an astronaut radioed the crew from . "But we wanted to make sure you had the right data to perform some of these procedures if necessary." "Understand," replied flight engineer Peggy Whitson. "OK. If 9A (Atlantis) slips more than a couple of days we may need to perform a Progress reboost, including attitude handovers between U.S. and Russian segments, and we may ask you to play a role in that in the event we're evacuated. Of course, stand by for deltas to all of this as the weather situation dictates." Given Lili's current track toward the Gulf Coast, the decision to delay Atlantis' launching was not a surprise. "We're going to be conservative and we would not entertain launching until we were sure that hurricane does not present a threat to our mission control center in ," shuttle program manager Ronald Dittemore said Monday. The weather in Florida remains generally favorable, with a 60 percent chance of acceptable conditions during the shuttle's launch window Wednesday. The odds improve to 70 percent "go" both Thursday and Friday. But NASA's shuttle mission control center is located at the Johnson Space Center and program managers do not want to proceed with launch preparations if mission control might have to be evacuated at some point because of Lili. In addition, shuttle managers want to give JSC workers currently in Florida a chance to get home to their families if necessary. "It is likely that if the storm continues on its path that's projected by the weather experts that we'll send all the folks home, back to , so they can take care of their immediate needs in the local area and make sure their families are safe," Dittemore said Monday. "And when that issue has passed, we'll look up again and determine when we're going to begin launch operations." Launch could be delayed longer than one or even two days under some scenarios covering the possible evacuation and shutdown of the Johnson Space Center. If critical systems are shut down prior to a general evacuation, it could take three to four days to power back up and reconfigure for launch. Under that scenario, launch could slip to the weekend or even early next week. But predicting the path of a hurricane is as much art as science and it's not yet clear what impact Lili will eventually have. At this point, all that can be said is launch is being delayed at least 24 hours. Another meeting to assess the progress of the storm is planned for 7:45 a.m. EDT Wednesday. To track the progress of Hurricane Lili, please visit the National Hurricane Center's web site. Updates will be posted here as warranted. 06:00 p.m., 10/01/02, Update: JSC goes to 'level 3' hurricane protection; launch off to at least Friday Managers at the Johnson Space Center late today opted to implement "level 3" hurricane protection measures, beginning work to power down non-essential systems in mission control and elsewhere because of the threat of Hurricane Lili. The decision eliminates any chance of launching the shuttle Atlantis before Friday, officials said. With Lili gathering strength in the Gulf of Mexico, NASA managers meeting at JSC late today decided they had no choice but to raise the threat level from four to three and begin an orderly implementation of measures designed to protect shuttle and space station mission control centers. It takes up to a day and a half to safely shut down critical computer systems and associated equipment to prevent any loss of data or physical damage that might occur in hurried emergency shutdown. The level three alert allows non-essential personnel to voluntarily leave work. Threat level 2 includes possible mandatory evacuation of non-essential personnel. Earlier today, NASA said Atlantis' launching, originally scheduled for Wednesday, would be delayed at least one day because of Hurricane Lili. Now, launch is off for at least two days and possibly more. If the Johnson Space Center ultimately is evaculated, launch likely would be delayed to the weekend or early next week. NASA managers will meet again Wednesday morning at 7:45 a.m. to assess Hurricane Lili's track and its possible impact on the Johnson Space Center. 06:30 p.m., 10/01/02, Update: ISS crew updated; Thursday remains official 'no-earlier-than' date but flight expected to slip to Friday or beyond Flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in have been told to begin powering down sensitive computer systems as Hurricane Lili churns toward the Gulf Coast. In the meantime, launch of the shuttle Atlantis, originally scheduled for Wednesday, is on hold. Around 6:30 p.m., ground controllers updated the space station's three-person crew on the implementation of "level 3" hurricane preparations at JSC. "We are going to level 3, which equates to gracefully powering down JSC and thus portions of station," an astronaut radioed the lab complex from mission congtrol. "If the weather patterns change for the better by morning or thereafter, we'll simply reverse efforts and power back up. But the bottom line is there is a chance we may or may not be on board with you tomorrow morning when you wake up." "When are they expecting landfall?" asked flight engineer Peggy Whitson. "They're saying Thursday evening at this time and it's a big question between south of us and all the way to the other side of Louisiana right now." "OK, copy," Whitson replied. Atlantis had been scheduled to blast off on the next space station assembly mission Wednesday afternoon. But with Lili heading toward the Gulf Coast, launch was delayed at least one day to give JSC workers time to prepare. Then, at 6 p.m., JSC managers ordered implementation of level 3 protective measures, which includes powering down various computer systems, both on the ground and aboard the space station. At that point, NASA public affairs officers at the Kennedy Space Center said implementation of level 3 preparations would eliminate any chance of launching Atlantis Thursday. Later still, another NASA spokesman said Thursday remained the official "no-earlier-than" launch date. But sources say the powerdown procedures currently being implemented at JSC will, in fact, prevent any chance of launching Atlantis before Friday. When all is said and done, launch could slip even more. NASA's mission management team plans to meet again Wednesday morning to assess Lili's progress. An "official" decision on how the agency plans to proceed is expected later in the morning. =================================================================== Launch delayed to Oct. 7 (10/02/02) 05:30 a.m., 10/02/02, Update: ISS flight controllers move to backup facility Flight controllers overseeing operations aboard the international space station are moving to a backup facility at the Johnson Space Center because of the approach of Hurricane Lili. The space center currently is implementing "level 3" hurricane protection procedures, powering down computers and other equipment. Flight controllers told the astronauts this morning they are moving to Building 4 at the Johnson Space Center and awaiting word on whether NASA managers might implement more stringent level 2 procedures, which would require the evacuation of non-essential personnel. "OK. You guys take care down there," station flight engineer Peggy Whitson radioed. The National Hurricane Center's 5 a.m. advisory predicts Lili will become a Category 3 hurricane later today and remain at that strength until landfall. Winds currently are a sustained 110 mph. Lili's projected path carries the eye of the storm to landfall along the Louisiana coast just south of New Iberia. The Johnson Space Center is located at the western edge of the current hurricane warning zone. NASA managers are scheduled to meet at 7:45 a.m. today to assess Lili's progress and to decide what, if any, additional measures might be needed. In the meantime, launch of the shuttle Atlantis, originally scheduled for this afternoon, remains on hold. Because of the complex computer system powerdowns in shuttle mission control at the Johnson Space Center - and the time needed to restore them to normal operations - sources say NASA will not be able to support another launch attempt before this weekend at the earliest. 08:30 a.m., 10/02/02, Update: Shuttle launch delayed to Monday Launch of the shuttle Atlantis on a space station assembly mission has been delayed to no earlier than Monday because of Hurricane Lili's approach to the Gulf Coast and the protective powering down of sensitive mission control systems at the Johnson Space Center near . U.S. control of the international space station was handed over to Russia and a small contingent of NASA personnel at the Russian mission control center near Moscow at 5 a.m. today, after U.S. controllers at JSC left their normal control center. "OK. You guys take care down there," station flight engineer Peggy Whitson radioed. Implementation of "level 3" hurricane protection measures overnight resulted in a carefully orchestrated shut down of mission control systems used to support ongoing station operations and shuttle missions. The shutdown was ordered to protect against the possibility of an evacuation or loss of electrical power due to the impact of Lili. Assuming engineers begin powering systems back up Thursday, the shuttle Atlantis could be launched as early as Monday. At the Kennedy Space Center, engineers will top off Atlantis' on-board supplies of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, used to power the ship's electrical generators, to restore its capability to make five launch attempts if necessary. If all goes well, the countdown will be restarted at the T-minus 11-hour mark. At the Johnson Space Center, NASA managers are still evaluating Lili's track and debating whether to implement level 2 procedures, which would require the evacuation of non-essential personnel. As of this writing, officials say that doesn't appear likely. But given the time needed to re-activate mission control computer systems, launch is off until at least Monday regardless. 12:30 p.m., 10/02/02, Update: NASA optimistic about Monday launch With engineers in Florida "baby sitting" the shuttle Atlantis, NASA workers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston have completed work to power down sensitive mission control computer systems in preparation for the approach of Hurricane Lili. Control of the international space station's U.S. segment has been transferred to a small NASA contingent at the Russian mission control center near Moscow. Computer systems at the Johnson Space Center that normally support station and shuttle operations have been shut down, a complex procedure that has never been done before. In the meantime, launch of the shuttle Atlantis, originally scheduled for today, is on hold until Monday at the earliest. Many of the JSC workers stationed in Florida for the STS-112 launch campaign have flown back to Texas. Atlantis' crew, however, elected to remain in Florida with their families. "As you can imagine, last night there was a flurry of activity at JSC as they continued their hurricane preparations to deal with the approach of Hurricane Lili," astronaut James Halsell, chairman of NASA's mission management team, told reporters today. "They continue to believe, with a high level of confidence, that it will make a turn to the north away from the area and yet that turn will not become visible until later on this evening, maybe not until the wee hours of the morning. So as a result, JSC has to make the appropriate preparations for both the safety of their people and their resources to allow for an evacuation if that becomes necessary." As a result, Halsell's mission management team agreed to delay Atlantis' launch to no earlier than Monday. That will give JSC workers time to prepare for and ride out whatever severe weather blows through and then to power up now-dormant computer systems. Those systems then will have to be checked out to make sure they are properly integrated. Flight controllers also plan to conduct limited simulations to confirm the computer systems are ready to support launch. "The international space station component of the control center handed off control successfully last night to the support group at the mission control center in Moscow and then powered down the ISS mission control center element there in Houston," Halsell said. "In parallel with that, the shuttle mission control center, which had been fully prepped and the configuration frozen to support the shuttle launch, they also had to power down in preparation for a minimal manning circumstance. "It will take some time after the hurricane makes landfall and the Johnson Space Center is able to reconstitute their personnel," he said. "It will take some time to for them to go through the procedures required to bring the power back up, to bring the systems back on line, to re-establish the network and then to go through a series of revalidations, retesting, to ensure they're absolutely, 100 percent ready to safely support. ... So that's how we ended up with Monday as a launch date." Assuming engineers begin re-activating their computer systems Thursday as currently planned, control of the U.S. segment of the international space station should be transferred back to JSC sometime Friday, officials said. The 11 a.m. forecast advisory from the National Hurricane Center in Miami says Lili, moving toward the northwest at 15 mph, has become a "major hurricane" with maximum sustained winds near 120 mph and gusts even higher. "This makes Lili a dangerous Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale," the advisory said. "Some additional strengthening is possible during the next 24 hours." A storm surge of eight to 12 feet above normal is likely near the point where the eye of the storm makes landfall and six to eight inches of rain can be expected along the hurricane's track. National Hurricane Center computer models are "tightly clustered" and show a narrow range of landfalls along the Louisiana coast centered on the region just south of New Iberia. Hurricane warnings extend from the mouth of the Mississippi River to just east of Galveston Bay, Texas, where the Johnson Space Center is located. Asked if he was frustrated with this week's launch delay, Halsell said "I guess that's the nature of the business and the longer I'm in it, the more I get used to it." "This is certainly a unique issue," he said. "To my knowledge, I don't know that the program has had to deal with a hurricane threatening JSC and the mission control center at the time we're trying to launch a shuttle here." Shuttle launch director Michael Leinbach agreed, saying "If you can't accept a few curves in this business, then you don't belong here. Yeah, we would have liked to launch this afternoon or tomorrow. But we'll get there Monday and that'll be fine." Leinbach said Atlantis' countdown will remain in a "hold" at the T-minus 11-hour mark. Late tonight, engineers will drain liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen from the shuttle that power the ship's electricity producing fuel cells. Those tanks will be refilled Saturday, providing up to five launch opportunities. The shuttle's communications systems will be activated Sunday to set the stage for a Monday liftoff. NASA's mission management team will meet again Sunday afternoon to assess launch preparations. A final news briefing is planned for 3:30 p.m. At that point, NASA will announce Atlantis' official launch time and release a detailed mission timeline. Until then, the previously announced 2 p.m.-to-6 p.m.launch window remains in effect. =================================================================== Atlantis tentatively cleared for flight (10/06/02) After standing down for Hurricane Lili, NASA's mission management team met today and tentatively cleared the shuttle Atlantis for blastoff Monday on a flight to resume space station assembly after a summer of delays. Engineers are troubleshooting a problem with a backup heater used to keep a fuel cell water line free of ice. But flight controllers have two other ways of flushing water from the system and they are optimistic the shuttle will get a final green light during a meeting early Monday. "I feel preliminarily confident that we're going to be able to find a path through the wilderness in time to make a run at a launch countdown tomorrow," said MMT chairman James Halsell. "But I need the engineers to come tell us that." And so, with forecasters calling for an 80 percent chance of acceptable weather, Atlantis' launch window will open at 3:40:51 p.m. and close at 3:50:50 p.m. The preferred launch time within that window, the moment when Earth's rotation will carry pad 39B into the plane of the space station's orbit, is 3:45:51 p.m. The primary weather concern is for isolated inland thundershowers that could produce electrically active anvil clouds near the Kennedy Space Center. The forecast drops to 70 percent "go" on Tuesday and 60 percent go on Wednesday. NASA had hoped to launch Atlantis and its six-member crew last Wednesday, but the flight was delayed because of the threat from Hurricane Lili to the Johnson Space Center near Houston, where the shuttle and station mission control centers are located. Playing it safe, engineers shut down both control centers and transferred control of the U.S. segment of the station to a small NASA contingent at the Russian control center near Moscow. After the hurricane passed, the systems were powered back up and re-integrated into the complex network needed to support space flight. "They have not only brought up all of their communication, command and trajectory computer systems successfully, but they have also done the retest and the revalidation to ensure they are ready to go," said Halsell. Control of the U.S. segment of the station was transferred back to JSC overnight Thursday and on Saturday, flight controllers carried out a series of simulated shuttle launches to make sure the shuttle control center's computer system was back up and in good health. Atlantis' crew - commander Jeffrey Ashby, pilot Pamela Melroy, David Wolf, Sandra Magnus, Piers Sellers and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin - spent the weekend with their families at the Kennedy Space Center. The issue with the fuel cell water line cropped up early Sunday, after engineers finished loading liquid hydrogen and oxygen aboard the shuttle to power the shuttle's three electricity producing fuel cells. The fuel cells work by combining hydrogen and oxygen in a sort of reverse hydrolysis, producing electricity, water and free hydrogen. The hydrogen is vented overboard. The crew drinks the water and uses it to cool electrical equipment. But if the crew or flight controllers cannot dump excess water, and if that water backs up into the fuel cells, electrical generation falls off sharply. In a worst-case scenario, the shuttle could lose power before a crew could make an emergency return to Earth. Because this is a "crit 1" system, each shuttle has multiple paths for getting rid of excess water. The problem engineers are wrestling with today is a heater near the valve where fuel cell water is dumped overboard. The heater circuit is actually keeping the line hotter than required - 230 to 250 degrees Fahrenheit versus a normal set point of 170 degrees. Engineers are concerned because the control circuitry in question is not functioning properly and subsequent trouble could lead to much higher-than-allowable temperatures, causing potential damage. But with two other independent paths for ridding the system of excess water, flight controllers seem confident they can manage the system in orbit even if the heater ultimately must be turned off before or during the mission. Launch director Michael Leinbach said it would take several days to replace the heater controller, which is located under the forward floor of the shuttle's cargo bay. While the actual replacement work is relatively easy, getting to the suspect unit and then backing out of the cargo bay would be time consuming. Halsell's mission management team is scheduled to meet at 5:45 a.m. Monday to assess the shuttle's health and to give engineers formal permission to begin fueling Atlantis for launch. The three-hour fueling procedure is scheduled to begin around 6:20 a.m., assuming the MMT clears the suspect heater system for launch "as is." Just for the record, Leinbach said engineers also are troubleshooting an apparently minor problem involving oil contamination in servicing equipment based at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. Atlantis was serviced by this same equipment a year and a half ago and has flown two missions since then. But engineers want to make sure the possibly affected shuttle systems are oil free. At the same time, they are evaluating what to do if Atlantis ultimately is diverted to Edwards at the end of its upcoming mission. Leinbach said one option is to break the equipment down and clean it or, if that can't be done in time, to ship equipment to Edwards from Kennedy. Either way, this appears to be a minor issue. =================================================================== Shuttle Atlantis rockets into orbit (10/07/02) 06:40 a.m., 10/07/02, Update: Atlantis cleared for launch; fueling begins NASA's mission management team met early today and, after reviewing an engineering analysis of a suspect heater in a fuel cell water line, cleared the shuttle Atlantis for launch as is and directed engineers to begin fueling the spacecraft for liftoff at 3:45:51 p.m. Working by remote control, engineers began pumping a half-million gallons of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen rocket fuel into Atlantis' external tank at 6:20 a.m. If all goes well, the huge tank will be fully loaded by 9:20 a.m. or so. Forecasters are predicting a 90 percent chance of good weather for today's launch attempt. Early Sunday, engineers discovered problems with a heater used to keep a fuel cell water dump line free of ice after launch. The fuel cells generate electricity by combining liquid oxygen and hydrogen in a process that also generates fresh water for cooling and crew consumption. Flight controllers have three independent ways of getting rid of excess water and the heater in question only affected one of them. But getting rid of excess water is critical. If water somehow backed up into the fuel cells, the generators would shut down and the shuttle cannot operate without electrical power. Engineers worked all day yesterday and into the night to make sure they could safely handle buildups of excess water even if the line in question could not be used. In the end, they were able to do just that. Another surprise cropped up overnight when a "red team" was dispatched to the pad to troubleshoot problems with a heater in a ground system used to keep gaseous nitrogen at the proper temperature. That problem was resolved with no impact on the countdown. Atlantis' launch window today opens at 3:40:51 p.m. and closes 10 minutes later, at 3:50:50 p.m. But like all recent flights to the international space station, ground controllers will target the shuttle's liftoff for the moment Earth's rotation carries pad 39B into the plane of the station's orbit. That occurs at 3:45:51 p.m. The time may change by a few seconds depending on the outcome of updated radar tracking of the station. By launching "in plane" with the station, the shuttle crew can maximize performance, minimize propellant usage and improve the ship's ability to reach an East Coast landing site in the event of major engine problems early in the ascent. NASA television coverage of today's launch attempt will begin at 12:30 p.m., after the shuttle's crew has reached the launch pad. Videotape showing the astronauts' breakfast photo op, suit up and walkout will be replayed shortly thereafter. 08:00 a.m., 10/07/02, Update: Clarifying; red team fixed nitrogen heater, not shuttle fuel cell water line heater NASA spokesman George Diller says a red team dispatched to pad 39B overnight successfully resolved problems with a gaseous nitrogen heater in a ground system. Earlier today, reporters were told the red team repaired a suspect heater in a shuttle fuel cell water discharge line. That heater, in fact, has not been fixed and is considered failed. NASA's mission management team decided earlier today Atlantis can be safely launched as is. The 6:40 a.m. status report below has been corrected. 12:35 p.m., 10/07/02, Update: Astronauts strap in for launch The shuttle Atlantis has been loaded with rocket fuel and its six crew members are strapping in for a launch attempt at 3:45:51 p.m. There are no technical problems at pad 39B and while heavy clouds, some with rain, currently are sweeping over the Kennedy Space Center, forecasters remain optimistic the sky will clear in time for launch. In keeping with NASA's post-Sept. 11 security policy, the astronauts were not shown on NASA television until the crew reached the launch pad around 12:15 p.m. 02:45 p.m., 10/07/02, Update: Shuttle hatch closed for flight Engineers have closed and locked the shuttle Atlantis' crew hatch and all systems remain "go" for launch. The weather appears to be improving as expected and the shuttle's countdown is on track for launch. Two engineers were dispatched to Atlantis' mobile launch platform to reset blown fuses in a ground system, but that appears to be of no consequence. This page will be updated after Atlantis takes off or as conditions warrant. 04:05 p.m., 10/07/02, Update: Shuttle Atlantis blasts off After a frustrating summer of delays to fix potentially dangerous fuel line cracks, the shuttle Atlantis roared away today on a critical mission to deliver a 14-ton section of the international space station's main solar array truss. Running five days late because of Hurricane Lili, Atlantis' three main engines thundered to life at 3:45:51 p.m., followed six seconds later by ignition of the shuttle's twin solid-fuel boosters. With a crackling roar, the 4.5-million-pound spacecraft instantly began climbing skyward, knifing through a partly cloudy sky as it rolled about its long axis and lined up on a trajectory up the East Coast. Spectacular television views of the shuttle's ascent were beamed down from a small downward-pointed camera mounted near the nose of the ship's external tank. The view from the wide-angle "rocket cam" showed the orbiter, the side of the tank, the right-side booster and launch pad 39B dropping away as Atlantis thundered aloft. As the shuttle gained altitude and wheeled about to line up on the proper trajectory, the camera showed the shadow of the booster exhaust plume stretching away over the Atlantic Ocean as the launch complex dwindled below. The six-inch-long camera operated through main engine cutoff and separation of the external tank, but the exhaust plume from the small motors used to jettison the solid-fuel boosters two minutes after liftoff fogged the lens enough to wash out any detail after that. Commander Jeffrey Ashby, pilot Pamela Melroy, flight engineer Sandra Magnus, cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and spacewalkers Piers Sellers and David Wolf, a Mir veteran, promptly got to work after reaching orbit, rigging Atlantis for an orbit circularization rocket firing and doffing their bulky pressure suits. "OK, Jeff. Atlantis is ready for you, the weather is beautiful and you guys have been in Florida far too long," launch director Michael Leinbach radioed a few minutes before liftoff. "So we wish you luck as you continue the assembly sequence of the international space station. Good luck." "Thank you," Ashby replied. "You've done a great job of putting Atlantis and the S1 truss together. We thank you for your hard work, now it's our turn." Atlantis' launching originally was planned for August, after the July flight of the shuttle Columbia on a microgravity research mission. But the shuttle fleet was grounded in early July after engineers discovered small cracks in the hydrogen fuel lines in the main propulsion systems of each space shuttle. The cracks ultimately were welded over and rough edges were polished to prevent the development of additional cracks. Columbia's flight slipped to early January when all was said and done while Atlantis moved to Sept. 28. The flight then was delayed to Oct. 2 by problems with the massive crawlers used to haul shuttles to the launch pad. Then, last week, launch was delayed again to power down mission control at the Johnson Space Center as Hurricane Lili approached the Gulf Coast. A final surprise cropped up Sunday when engineers discovered problems with a heater used to keep a fuel cell water dump line free of ice during flight. Early this morning, however, mission managers cleared Atlantis for launch as is after being briefed on alternative measures for dumping excess water overboard. As with all station flights, today's launching was timed to coincide with the moment Earth's rotation carried pad 39B into the plane of the lab's orbit. If all goes well, Ashby will guide Atlantis to a docking with the space station Wednesday at 11:29 a.m. Awaiting their arrival will be Expedition 5 commander Valery Korzun, Sergei Treschev and NASA biochemist Peggy Whitson. The station's fifth full-time crew, Korzun and company were launched to the outpost June 5 aboard the shuttle Endeavour. They are scheduled to return to Earth around Nov. 20 to close out a 167-day voyage. The station has been continuously manned for 691 days as of Sept. 24. The primary goal of Atlantis' flight is to deliver and install the first starboard side - S1 - outboard solar array truss segment, a massive 45-foot-long, 15-foot-wide component massing 28,776 pounds. When completed, the station's nine-segment solar array truss will stretch longer than a football field and carry two huge sets of solar panels on each end. Radiators inboard of the solar arrays will dissipate the heat generated by the station's electronic systems. The central element of the truss, a $600 million component known as S0, was attached to the top of the U.S. laboratory module Destiny during a shuttle flight in April. The Boeing-built $390 million S1 segment aboard Atlantis is the first outboard section. A virtually identical segment, known as P1, will be attached to the port, or left side of the central S0 truss during the next shuttle visit in November. S1 is scheduled for attachment to S0 on Thursday, the day after Atlantis docks with the station. Whitson and Magnus, operating the station's Canadarm2 space crane, plan to pull S1 from the shuttle's cargo bay and to carefully position it so a powerful, remotely operated claw at the end of S0 can engage a capture bar on the near end of S1. After the claw pulls the two segments together, motorized bolts at the four corners of the truss interface will drive in to lock the two segments firmly together. While the attachment process is winding up, Wolf and Sellers will exit the station's Quest airlock module for the first of three planned spacewalks to connect electrical cables, ammonia coolant lines and data links between S1 and S0 and to install fittings to prevent fluid line connectors from sticking together. During the first spacewalk, however, Wolf and Sellers will focus on making critical electrical connections and deploying a new S-band antenna. "I think the tasks being performed on these EVAs are comparable to what we've done on other missions," said station flight director Andrew Algate. "Many of the tasks are similar. We're hooking up ammonia QDs (quick-disconnect fittings), which we've done before, we're mating electrical umbilicals, all the tasks we're doing on these EVAs have been done on previous missions." Even so, no one takes the work lightly. "We don't want to cause any damage out there," Wolf said. "We need to be very careful. It's a delicate, in some ways, space station. Lots of antennas, no-touch areas, so we'll be very cognizant of those." S1 and P1 will provide the cooling needed for the space station's electrical systems. The two truss segments each feature three huge folding radiator arrays made up of eight panels each that will extend 75 feet into space to dissipate up to 72,000 watts of heat, enough to cool eight 2,000-square-foot homes. S1 and P1 house independent computers to operate and monitor internal systems, ammonia tanks, pump assemblies and nitrogen pressurization systems for the coolant loops. Each segment features 15 miles of electrical wiring, a third of a mile of fiber optic cabling and 426 feet of stainless steel tubing to route ammonia coolant between the radiators and heat exchangers mounted on S0 and elsewhere. S1 also features an S-band antenna and electronic gear to provide a redundant satellite communications path to the ground, a video system that will aid in future assembly operations and a small cart that future spacewalkers can use to move equipment and tools to different work sites. Heat rejection is provided by two independent ammonia coolant loops. The extendable radiator wings are mounted at right angles to a rectangular framework that can be rotated through 105 degrees to point the radiators toward the cold of deep space. "It's hard to convey in words what we're really doing," said station program manager Bill Gerstenmaier. "The thing that's challenging about this is this is the first time we've ever attached two truss segments together. "Then you have all the connectors and fluid lines that have to be mated between the two truss pieces," he added. "Then there's all the electrical stuff, there are new computers out there that have to interface with the other computers on the station, so we had to get that software synched up. "There's now a thermal rotary joint. This thing rotates and all the ammonia has to flow through this rotating joint (to and from the radiators) and that's a very complex mechanical design. Overall, it's almost mind boggling what we're doing putting this thing together." If all goes well, Atlantis will return to Earth Oct. 18. =================================================================== Astronauts prepare for station docking (10/08/02) The Atlantis astronauts, awakened at 5:46 a.m., are working through their morning routine, getting ready for a busy day of preparation for docking Wednesday with the international space station. The flight plan calls for three rendezvous rocket firings today, tests of the shuttle's robot arm and checkout of the spacesuits that will be used by spacewalkers David Wolf and Piers Sellers later in the mission. Revision A of the NASA television schedule is posted below, along with an updated timeline flight day 2. There are no technical problems of any significance with Atlantis and the crew is in excellent spirits. "As you can see, it's absolutely extraordinary," pilot Pamela Melroy radioed last night, just before bedtime. "We don't usually turn the (in-cabin) camera on this early because nobody feels like it, but everybody's feeling fantastically well and we're all having so much fun, we all feel great. It's really wonderful to be back in magic land again." Celebrating her 14th wedding anniversary in orbit, Melroy, making her second flight, radioed her husband back on Earth: "I love you, sweetie!" Earlier in the evening, flight engineer Sandra Magnus and Sellers, both making their first flights, narrated video shot on Atlantis' upper flight deck as the shuttle thundered toward space, providing a detailed glimpse of what it's like to ride a space shuttle: SELLERS: The whole business of getting off the ground was a lot more violent, I think, than either of us thought. We kind of looked at each other and our eyebrows went up and then the whole world seemed to turn around, the sun flashed across the cockpit as we rolled and then we just kept getting faster and faster, everything shaking and banging away. We're coming up on SRB (solid rocket booster) separation... Sandy? MAGNUS: We were getting ready for SRB sep and we were focused on the, uh... and you can see us right there checking the mirror, we were kind of pointing at each other and saying, 'hey, you've gotta look at this, you've gotta look at this, this is really cool!' We were watching the ground fall away behind us with the clouds and the Earth just falling away as we were getting up here. We were also wondering how the ET camera footage was going to look, so we're really anxious to see that when we get back down there. It wasn't as shaky as I thought it was going to be, actually. But it was definitely noisy. And we're getting ready for SRB sep here... and there is SRB sep! And I couldn't stop myself, I had to say 'wow!' because it was such a bright, flashing light and a big noise. And I'll turn it over to Piers... SELLERS: Yeah, we saw the flash and felt a big thump - something dramatic happened! - and it really smoothed out for a little while as we moved forward on the shuttle's main engines. Sandy and I could see the stuff, the fuel (from booster separation motors), coming by the windows, all very dramatic. And while all this was going on, the sky was turning colors, going from blue to kind of a deep, dark blue and slowing changing to black. Somewhere around about here, we ... passed the 50-mile point. MAGNUS: Of course, the 50-mile point is the place where we became official astronauts. We kind of looked at each other and went, 'wow!' That's pretty cool. And it was really special because Piers and I are classmates, so we were sharing this together. And we hollered down to the middeck to let Fyodor (Yurchikhin, a cosmonaut making his first flight) know as well that we were truly astronauts now. And we continued on our way and Piers is right, it really was a lot smoother here, although you could still, of course, here the roaring of the engines. We were all fixated on the CRTs and looking at what the data was doing and sneaking looks in the mirror occasionally. It was real interesting to see the clouds. You can see us right there looking in the mirror and I was like, 'Piers, you've gotta see this!' Because there's all kinds of neat clouds going by underneath us and the texture was amazing. We were sharing the mirror there, back and forth, trying to... this is actually the 50-nautical mile point, right here, you can see us celebrating a little bit... You know, there were times, I was really focused on trying to do my MS-2 job and make the right calls and Piers was doing a great job of calling the comm boundaries, but I have to tell you, half my brain was trying to absorb all the sounds and sights and feelings and trying to remember the moment. SELLERS: Yeah, it was really strange. There you were, trying to do all the stuff you've been trained to do in the (shuttle simulator) and there is something familiar about this from the sim, but there's something else going on out there that is totally unfamiliar. Sandy and I were looking at each other, and looking at the scenery just change, second by second, out the windows. It was unbelievable. You could really feel yourself hurtling through the air and then through space, faster and faster and faster. And it was quite extraordinary. MAGNUS: I have to tell you, the other thing that was going through my mind was picturing all the people at the Cape who were watching the launch. Having seen a launch once or twice before, I was trying to imagine what they were look at and what they were thinking because, having seen it from the outside and now being on the inside, it was really interesting because I just pictured everybody out there at Banana Creek, at the LCC, everywhere, just watching and watching and watching. And here we were just shaking and rattling and heading all the way up to space. SELLERS: As you can see, things are pretty smooth, the motors (main engines) are just burning away behind us. What's happening now is the acceleration is beginning to pick up and we're all beginning to feel the load build, mostly shoving you back into your seat. And really toward the last minute or so, it kind of got mostly uncomfortable. You're being stuffed back in your seat and all the little lumps in your suit and things in your seat back are beginning to stick into you. Luckily, we over ate at crew quarters so there was plenty of padding. MAGNUS: You just saw me shake the mirror at Piers, I was like, 'Piers, Piers, you've gotta see this.' We're starting the roll here and what was happening was we were far enough up that you could see the horizon so we weren't just looking at clouds with texture ... and it was absolutely gorgeous! We had the bright blue and puffy white clouds of the Earth and then as you got up above the horizon a little bit more the blues got deeper and deeper and deeper and it was just like one big blue rainbow as it went through the different shades of blue. It was gorgeous. If I hadn't have been strapped in my seat I would have just been floating for the sheer joy of it at that point. SELLERS: So right now we're at about three Gs, shoving us back in our seats here, coming up on mach 20. As you can see, one of my checklists has decided to go for a walk there, it's ripped itself off the velcro and it's just hanging straight back. The mach numbers are really streaking by now, going very, very fast. It's a little uncomfortable, 30 seconds to go (until main engine cutoff). Sandy and I don't really know what to expect in 30 seconds. All I could think about was how this was aching a little bit. You should see MECO when my checklist in the right hand corner of the screen just goes weightless, you'll see it happen. Right now, my checklist, along with my brain and my kidneys is being pulled back at 3 Gs... and there it is, MECO, you can see how the cables go limp and stuff starts floating around in the cabin. And Sandy and I are just suddenly sort of floating out of our seats. MAGNUS: "It was really noticeable once we hit MECO that we started floating out of our seats. And I just had to do it, I put my checklist in front of me and I let go of it and it was just floating there, and it was like, 'Piers, look! It's floating!' I just started giggling because it was so cool. Astronaut Cady Coleman in mission control thanked the astronauts for narrating the in-cabin view, saying "I just can't thank you enough for sharing that experience." "We sure wish we cold bring you guys up here because this IS an experience," Magnus replied. "Unfortunately, I don't know if words can really convey it ... but I wish you could all be here." "And for everybody down there, I can't wait until they invent antigravity and you do this, too!" =================================================================== Atlantis docks with space station(10/09/02) 06:30 a.m., 10/09/02, Update: Shuttle Atlantis closes in on station The shuttle Atlantis is closing in on the international space station this morning, with all systems "go" for a docking around 11:24 a.m. The three-day rendezvous procedure began at launch Monday when Atlantis blasted off into the plane of the station's orbit. Commander Jeffrey Ashby and his five crewmates have slowly closed the gap between the two spacecraft with a series of precise rocket firings, setting the stage for today's linkup. "We're ... up and ready for a big day today as we rendezvous with the international space station," Ashby radioed at crew wakeup. Trailing the station by about 9.2 statute miles, Ashby plans to fire Atlantis' maneuvering jets at 9:04 a.m. to begin the terminal phase of the rendezvous. From there, Ashby and pilot Pamela Melroy will oversee a series of computer-controlled rocket firings designed to place the shuttle at a point 600 feet or so directly below the lab complex by around 10:34 a.m. At about that point, Ashby will take over manual control and pilot Atlantis in a slow loop up to a point 310 feet directly in front of the lab complex as both spacecraft race through space at five miles per second. The international space station currently is made up of four main habitable modules and two airlock modules - one Russian and one American. Think of the four main modules as a train moving through space. The U.S. laboratory module Destiny is in front, followed by a multi-hatch node called Unity that serves as a gateway to the Russian segment of the outpost. Connected to the node on the opposite side from Destiny is a pressurized mating adapter, or PMA, leading into the Russian-built NASA-financed Zarya propulsion and storage module. Zarya, in turn, is connected to the Zvezda command module. The Russian Pirs docking and airlock module is attached to Zvezda's downward-facing, or nadir, port. Russian Progress supply ships typically dock at Zvezda's aft port while Soyuz lifeboats can be docked at Pirs or a nadir port on the Zarya module. When Atlantis arrives, the Progress 9 cargo ship will be docked to Zvezda's aft port while the current Soyuz lifeboat will be docked to Zarya's nadir port. Facing forward, the U.S. Quest airlock module is attached to Unity's right-side, or starboard, hatch. The Z1 truss, containing the lab's four massive U.S.-built gyroscopes, is bolted to Unity's upward-facing, or zenith, port. Mounted on top of Z1 is the P6 solar array, a huge set of electricity producing panels that ultimately will be moved to the port side of the solar array truss currently under construction. The P6 array truss also includes a thermal control system to provide cooling until the main truss is completed. The solar wings stretch 240 feet from tip to tip, towering 90 feet above the main body of the station. The imaginary line marking the station's orbital path is called the velocity vector, or V bar. By convention, points in front of the station are positive and those behind, negative. The imaginary line between the station and the center of the Earth is known as the radius vector, or R bar. Atlantis will reach a point on the plus V bar 310 feet directly in front of the Destiny module around 10:48 a.m. With the shuttle's tail pointing toward Earth, Ashby will manually guide Atlantis in so the docking system in the shuttle's cargo bay can mate with its counterpart on a pressurized mating adapter attached to Destiny's forward hatch. After hooks and latches engage, the two spacecraft will be locked together. After leak checks, hatches between the two spacecraft will be opened around 1:36 p.m. and station commander Valery Korzun and his two Expedition 5 crewmates will welcome Atlantis' six astronauts on board. After a safety briefing, the combined crews will get down to work. Along with staging three spacewalks to install a 14-ton solar array truss segment, the shuttle crew also plans to deliver about 1,000 pounds of supplies and equipment, along with a few tasty treats for the station crew. "They're looking forward to getting some apples and oranges and things of that nature," shuttle flight engineer Sandra Magnus said at a pre-flight briefing. "There's a pecan pie that we're trying to get up there to them. But that's a secret, don't let them know. That's going to be a surprise!" Here is an integrated timeline of today's rendezvous and docking activity (in EDT and mission elapsed time): TIME.......DD...HH...MM...EVENT 10/09/02 08:46 AM...01...17...00...Sunrise 09:04 AM...01...17...18...Terminal phase of rendezvous begins 09:14 AM...01...17...28...Noon 09:42 AM...01...17...56...Sunset 09:58 AM...01...18...12...Station maneuvers to docking attitude 10:19 AM...01...18...33...Sunrise 10:19 AM...01...18...33...Station in docking attitude 10:21 AM...01...18...35...MC 4 rendezvous burn 10:24 AM...01...18...38...Range: 1,500 feet 10:29 AM...01...18...43...Range: 1,000 feet 10:30 AM...01...18...44...KU to low power; range: 800 feet 10:34 AM...01...18...48...Range: 600 feet (+r bar arrival) 10:36 AM...01...18...50...Range: 500 feet; start TORVA maneuver 10:38 AM...01...18...52...Range: 400 feet 10:46 AM...01...19...00...Range: 300 feet 10:46 AM...01...19...00...Noon 10:48 AM...01...19...02...Range: 310 feet; (+v bar arrival) 10:50 AM...01...19...04...Range: 250 feet 10:54 AM...01...19...08...Range: 200 feet 10:57 AM...01...19...11...Range: 170 feet 10:59 AM...01...19...13...Range: 150 feet 11:03 AM...01...19...17...Range: 100 feet 11:06 AM...01...19...20...Range: 75 feet 11:10 AM...01...19...24...Range: 50 feet 11:13 AM...01...19...27...Range: 30 feet; start stationkeeping 11:15 AM...01...19...29...Sunset 11:15 AM...01...19...29...TDRS-Z comsat acquisition of signal 11:18 AM...01...19...32...End stationkeeping; push to dock 11:19 AM...01...19...33...TDRS-Z loss of signal 11:19 AM...01...19...33...TDRS-West acquisition of signal 11:22 AM...01...19...36...Range: 10 feet 11:24 AM...01...19...38...DOCKING 11:51 AM...01...20...05...Sunrise 12:06 PM...01...20...20...Videotape of docking is replayed on NASA TV 01:00 PM...01...21...14...Mission status briefing. On NASA TV 01:36 PM...01...21...50...Shuttle-station hatch opening 07:46 PM...02...04...00...Shuttle/station crew sleep begins 08:00 PM...02...04...14...Daily highlights reel begins airing on NASA TV In pre-flight NASA interviews, Ashby did not discuss the terminal rendezvous sequence. But Kenneth Cockrell, Endeavour's commander of a shuttle flight in June, provided a good description of the final series of steps. "It's really a fun piloting task," Cockrell said. "It's like driving a ship. You make very small inputs that take a long time to occur; but once they occur, they're very hard to stop. So it's something you need to do very precisely and it takes a lot of practice. "So we go in very slowly and gradually, we slow down at about 30 feet away from the docking port and just look through a zoomed-in camera at the target. The target has a little set of alignment guides on it and we make sure that we're all lined up, that the two vehicles are exactly in plane. "And then, from 30 feet in, we just hold a steady rate and we crash into the station," he joked. "That's a very slow crash. It's one-tenth of a foot per second. It's as slow as a snail would crawl." 09:10 a.m., 10/09/02, Update: Rocket firing begins terminal rendezvous phase Trailing the international space station by about nine miles, shuttle skipper Jeffrey Ashby fired Atlantis' left-side orbital maneuvering system rocket today at 9:04 a.m., kicking off the terminal phase of a complex orbital ballet leading to a docking around 11:24 a.m. Over the next 90 minutes or so, Ashby and pilot Pamela Melroy will oversee a handful of small midcourse correction maneuvers, all designed to get Atlantis to a point about 600 feet directly below the station around 10:34 a.m. Taking over manual control at that point, Ashby will guide the shuttle through a 14-minute quarter-loop pitch-up maneuver to a point 310 feet directly ahead of the station with the shuttle's tail facing Earth and its cargo bay facing the station. From there, starting around 10:48 a.m., Ashby will slowly guide the shuttle back toward the station for a docking at 11:24 a.m. There are no technical problems of any significance with the shuttle or the international space station and everything remains on track for this morning's linkup. 11:20 a.m., 10/09/02, Update: Atlantis docks with international space station The shuttle Atlantis glided to a picture-perfect docking with the international space station today, capping a flawless two-day orbital ballet that began with blastoff Monday. With commander Jeffrey Ashby at the controls, Atlantis' docking system gently engaged its counterpart on the front of the space station at 11:16 a.m. as the two spacecraft sailed 245 miles above central Asia at five miles per second. After waiting for residual motion between the two vehicles to damp out, hooks and latches in the docking system will pull the spacecraft firmly together. Leak checks then will be conducted to make sure a tight seal exists between the shuttle and the station and, if all goes well, hatches between the two vehicles will be opened around 1:30 p.m. 12:10 p.m., 10/09/02, Update: Astronauts ahead of schedule; hatch opening expected up to one hour early The shuttle-station astronauts are ahead of schedule working through leak checks and other post-docking procedures. Hatch opening, originally expected around 1:30 p.m., could come up to an hour ahead of schedule, NASA officials say. 12:55 p.m., 10/09/02, Update: Hatches opened; station crew welcomes shuttle colleagues aboard With excited shouts, the crew of shuttle Atlantis floated into the U.S. Destiny laboratory module of the international space station today, welcomed aboard by Expedition 5 commander Valery Korzun, Sergei Trechev and science officer Peggy Whitson. Hatch opening and the station's crew's welcome aboard were not carried live on NASA television, but a videotape replay is expected later in the day. After the two crews finish enjoying a bit of personal time with each other, Korzun will give the shuttle astronauts a safety briefing on various station systems before the two crews get to work. 02:45 p.m., 10/09/02, Update: Astronauts enjoy station welcome; mission status briefing. Because of a technical glitch, a video replay of today's shuttle-station hatch opening and crew welcoming ceremony did not immediately include any audio. But the video left little doubt both crews were very happy to see each other. The shuttle Atlantis docked with the space station at 11:17 a.m. and the final hatch between the two spacecraft was opened at 12:51 p.m., almost an hour ahead of schedule. Shuttle commander Jeffrey Ashby promptly floated into the U.S. laboratory module Destiny and immediately embraced station science officer Peggy Whitson, who welcomed him aboard with a hearty hug and backslaps. Shuttle flight engineer Sandra Magnus followed suit, followed by the rest of Atlantis' crew members, all smiling broadly as they greeted Whitson, station commander Valery Korzun and flight engineer Sergei Treschev. After a safety briefing from Korzun, the combined crews split up and began preparing for a busy day of work Thursday installing a 14-ton section of the station's main solar array truss. Whitson, assisted by Magnus, will use the station's Canadarm2 space crane to pluck the S1 truss segment from the shuttle's cargo bay and to attach it to the lone S0 section already in place atop the lab module. While that work is going on, shuttle spacewalkers Piers Sellers and David Wolf will be gearing up for the first of three spacewalks to hook up electrical lines, data cables and ammonia coolant loops. "The main thing they're going to be doing (today) is getting the suits set up for the EVA tomorrow," said lead flight director Phil Engelauf. "We carried two suits up on the shuttle, two spacesuits. The crew is only using one of those and they're using one of the suits that is on the space station. So we have some arm sizing and leg sizing components that we take from the shuttle over to the station side and configure the main body, the torso, of the suit on the station to fit Piers Sellers. "And so there's a little bit of work there today," he said. "And then there's a little bit of face time between the two crews to work on RMS (robot arm) choreography and coordination. These two crew have been training independently, with the ISS crew being on orbit already and the shuttle crew training on the ground. So we have some time reserved for them to sit down and review procedures face to face and just pretty much prepare for getting out the door tomorrow." The astronauts also will prepare the station's Quest airlock module for use Thursday before calling it a day. Both crews plan to go to bed at 7:46 p.m. for a wakeup call at 3:46 a.m. The flight plan calls for the S1 truss to be pulled from the shuttle's cargo bay around 6:46 a.m. and for the spacewalk to begin around 10:41 a.m. "The rendezvous went as planned and the crew did a great job of flying," Engelauf said of today's docking. "Everything is right on schedule for our first spacewalk tomorrow." =================================================================== S1 truss installed during first spacewalk (10/10/02) 05:30 a.m., 10/10/02, Update: Astronauts prepare for truss installation, spacewalk The combined crews of the shuttle Atlantis and the international space station are gearing up for the busiest day of the shuttle's assembly mission: Installation of a 14.5-ton section of the station's main solar array truss. Operating the station's Canadarm2 space crane, station science officer Peggy Whitson plans to pluck the 45-foot-long S1 truss section from Atlantis' cargo bay around 6:46 a.m. and to attach it to the lone truss segment currently in place on the station shortly after 9 a.m. Atlantis astronauts Piers Sellers and David Wolf, meanwhile - floating in the station's Quest airlock module - plan to begin a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk around 10:41 a.m. to begin hooking up electrical lines and data cables between S1 and the central S0 truss segment already in place. This will be the 44th spacewalk devoted to space station assembly and maintenance, the 19th staged from the station itself and the 10th to use the U.S. Quest airlock module. Going into today's excursion, 32 U.S. astronauts, one Canadian, one Frenchman and seven Russian cosmonauts had logged 265 hours and 44 minutes building the international outpost. When completed, the station's 11-segment solar array truss will stretch longer than a football field and carry two huge sets of solar panels on each end. Radiators inboard of the solar arrays will dissipate the heat generated by the station's electronic systems. The central element of the truss, a $600 million component known as S0, was attached to the top of the U.S. laboratory module Destiny during a shuttle flight in April. The Boeing-built $390 million S1 segment aboard Atlantis is the first outboard section, carrying half of the station's eventual ammonia cooling system. A virtually identical segment, known as P1, will be attached to the port, or left side of the central S0 truss during the next shuttle visit in November. "We're going to go out three times and in rough order of importance what we're going to try and do is to make all the electrical connections between the new piece of the station we're putting on there, the truss, and the existing station," said Sellers. "And this is to keep all the heaters alive and the brains of the new components alive, the electrical power. "The next thing we're going to do is put a new comm device on there, which will be used for communications between the crew and the station," he said. "Next important is fluid connections, we want to make the coolant loops that exist on station connect with the cooling radiators that are on the S1 truss. And the fourth thing that, I think, is going to be fun is to activate the CETA cart, which is this little railway cart that trundles up and down the front face of S1." Here is an updated timeline of today's spacewalk, or EVA, activity (in EDT and mission elapsed time): EDT........DD...HH...MM...EVENT 03:46 AM...02...12...00...STS crew wakeup 04:16 AM...02...12...30...ISS crew wakeup 06:31 AM...02...14...45...Canadarm2 grapples S1 truss 07:36 AM...02...15...50...S1 installation begins 09:56 AM...02...18...10...S1 bolt loading 10:01 AM...02...18...15...EVA-1: Airlock depressurization begins 10:36 AM...02...18...50...Canadarm2 ungrapples S1 10:46 AM...02...19...00...EVA-1: Airlock egress 10:56 AM...02...19...10...EVA-1: Sortie setup 11:41 AM...02...19...55...EVA-1: Wolf mates zenith tray connectors 11:41 AM...02...19...55...EVA-1: Sellers releases radiator launch locks 12:31 PM...02...20...45...EVA-1: Wolf and Sellers deploy S-band antenna 01:46 PM...02...22...00...EVA-1: Wolf disconnects CETA cart locks 01:46 PM...02...22...00...EVA-1: Sellers continues radiator beam lock release 02:16 PM...02...22...30...EVA-1: Wolf and Sellers install nadir TV camera 03:46 PM...03...00...00...EVA-1: Wolf disconnects more CETA cart launch locks 03:46 PM...03...00...00...EVA-1: Sellers mates S1 nadir tray connectors 04:51 PM...03...01...05...EVA-1: Airlock ingress 05:11 PM...03...01...25...EVA-1: Airlock repressurization 06:00 PM...03...02...14...Mission status briefing on NASA TV 08:46 PM...03...05...00...STS/ISS crew sleep begins 09:00 PM...03...05...14...Daily highlights reel airs on NASA TV; repeated hourly The S1 truss completely fills Atlantis' cargo bay. "The electrical utilities consist of 22 different types of wire, totaling 79,241 feet, or 15 miles of wire," said Ronald Torcivia, STS-112 launch package manager. "Another way to look at it is to say that for every foot of the 45-foot-long truss there is a third of a mile of wire. The electrical system has 103 separate harnesses with 8,020 contacts housed in 718 connections. "In addition, there is over a third of a mile of fiber optic cable used to carry video information. The fluid system provides all the utilities needed to transfer ammonia and nitrogen within the thermal control system as well as transferring it to the adjoining structures. "The fluid system consists of 426 feet of rigid stainless steel tubing terminating in 59 EVA-operable connections, or QDs (quick-disconnect fittings)," Torcivia said. "Fifty six of these QDs are used to transfer ammonia while three are used to transfer nitrogen. The ammonia lines are used for cooling and the nitrogen lines are used to maintain pressure within the ammonia system at 3,000 psi. Throw in a complex rotary joint that allows the radiators to be properly oriented, the S-band antenna system, the CETA cart and the segment's computer system and even the casual observer begins to realize the truss is more than a simple, if massive, structural element. "S1 is essentially a full spacecraft," said station program manager William Gerstenmaier. "The only thing it's lacking is propulsion and some attitude control determination. It has computers on board, multiplexers and de-multiplexers, it has a communications antenna system, it has integral thermal control system, it has radiators, a very large ammonia tank, a crew translation aid. It's a very, very complex spacecraft." While Wolf and Sellers begin preparations for their first spacewalk, Whitson and shuttle flight engineer Sandra Magnus will use the station's robot arm to slowly lift S1 from Atlantis' cargo bay. Shuttle commander Jeffrey Ashby will assist by positioning the shuttle's robot arm to provide different television views of the operation. "This is a major transition in the assembly sequence of the station," said shuttle pilot Pamela Melroy. "At the beginning, the work area was all very close to the shuttle. It was a pretty small station. We were attached to it. We could use the shuttle robotic arm, which, by the way, we have a lot of experience on and feel very comfortable using. We could do all of our assembly tasks very close to the shuttle. "Well, we're moving into a situation now, and the S1 truss is a classic example of it, it's way too far out there! It's on the other side of the shuttle from the robotic arm. There's just no way you can get it over there. So, we've transitioned to using the station arm for the assembly task. Reaching into the payload bay, pulling the S1 truss out, and putting it into position." The truss will be pulled straight up from the payload bay and then maneuvered over the starboard side of the orbiter until it is roughly lined up with S0. Canadarm2 will carefully position S1 so that its capture bar is within reach of a motorized claw at the end of S0. "When we bring S1 into the proper area of that claw, we have sensors around the truss that tell the system that we're in the proper position to begin latching," Torcivia said. "This claw begins to close and it pulls the two trusses together. Once they're together, we have a system called a bus bolt controller and they're located at the four corners of the truss. They are electrically driven screws that drive the structure together. And they can exert anywhere from 8,000 to 16,000 pounds of force on each corner." Wolf and Sellers will be cleared to exit the Quest airlock module once the initial attachment procedure is complete. But they could exit early if there are problems getting S0 and S1 connected. "If there's a problem lining things up, Dave and I will go out there and help guide things in," Sellers said. "Then, if the motorized bolts don't work that tie the new truss to the station, Dave and I have a pocket full of bolts to manually put in there and tie the two together." In a worst case scenario, Wolf and Sellers could use retention straps to ratchet the two truss segments together. But assuming no such problems develop, the spacewalkers will begin their excursion after S1 has been bolted to S0. The duo's first task is to hook up electrical connectors between S1 and S0 to route power into the new truss segment. The connectors are located in two utility trays, one on the upward, or zenith, side of S1 and the other on the nadir side. One tray has seven connectors and the other, eight. The astronauts will begin with the zenith tray. "The crew starts out by connecting up the first set of power and data umbilicals to the S1 truss segment," said station flight director Andrew Algate. "After that's complete, they'll be getting the S-band antenna from its stowed location and installing it on the truss and hooking up its power and data cables. Once this system is up and connected, a little later in the mission we'll be testing out this second string of communications gear." While Wolf and Sellers are working through their initial tasks, ground controllers will begin powering up internal truss systems, activating its computers and turning on critical heaters. The spacewalkers then will unlatch launch locks that held the CETA cart firmly in place during Atlantis' climb to space. CETA is NASA-ese for "crew EVA translation aid." "We know that there are going to be times when things break down," Melroy said in a NASA interview. "They do, just like they do in your house. So, you have to go out and you have to replace parts. And to do that, you have to do spacewalks. ... The designers of the station took this into consideration, and what's neat is there's this little railroad cart that runs along the bottom of the truss. And, it goes all the way out, in both directions. "(It) kind of makes me think of one of those little railroad carts that you kind of see them in TV and cartoons. But in fact what the crew will do is they pull themselves along hand-over-hand with their feet stuck in the cart, and that's how they move it from place to place. So, this cart will be a part of the, we're taking up one of these carts on the S1 truss, and we'll be basically getting it ready." After releasing launch locks holding the rotating radiator array framework in place, Wolf and Sellers plan to close out today's spacewalk by hooking up the second set of power and data umbilicals located in the nadir utility tray. Until both sets are connected, the truss is not considered in a safe configuration. The spacewalkers also will mount a video camera on one of the keel assemblies that held S1 in the shuttle's cargo bay. 06:50 a.m., 10/10/02, Update: Truss lifted from shuttle Astronaut Peggy Whitson, operating the space station's Canadarm2 space crane, has started the process of lifting the 14.5-ton S1 solar array truss segment from its perch in the shuttle Atlantis' cargo bay this morning, kicking off a complex series of steps to attach the segment to the station. The unberthing procedure began at 6:45 a.m. It will take Whitson three hours or so to complete the initial installation procedure, clearing the way for shuttle astronauts David Wolf and Piers Sellers to begin a 6.5-hour spacewalk to electrically connect the segment to the rest of the station. The spacewalk remains on track to begin around 10:45 a.m. 09:45 a.m., 10/10/02, Update: New truss segment attached to station The 14.5-ton, 45-foot-long S1 truss has been successfully attached to the central S0 truss atop the Destiny lab module of the international space station. A large motorized claw-like device in the S0 truss segment rotated closed at 9:36 a.m. to lock the two solar array truss sections together, three hours and 36 minutes after station astronaut Peggy Whitson used the lab's robot arm to pull S1 from the shuttle Atlantis' cargo bay. Whitson and shuttle astronaut Sandra Magnus now are beginning work to activate four large motorized bolts, one each at the four corners of the S0/S1 interface. Once fully engaged, the bolts will keep S1 firmly locked to S0 for the life of the space station. Astronauts David Wolf and Piers Sellers, meanwhile, are floating in the station's Quest airlock module, completing preparations for a planned six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk to make electrical and data line connections between S0 and S1. There are no technical problems of any significance and the spacewalk is on track to begin around 10:30 a.m. 11:30 a.m., 10/10/02, Update: Spacewalk begins Floating in the international space station's Quest airlock module, astronauts David Wolf and Piers Sellers switched their spacesuits to internal battery power at 11:21 a.m., officially beginning a planned 6.5-hour excursion. The goal of the 44th spacewalk in station history is to make critical electrical connections between the S1 solar array truss segment and the S0 truss it is attached to. The astronauts also plan to deploy an S-band antenna, release various launch locks on the truss' radiator panels and a small astronaut rail car and install a television camera on the Earth-facing side of the truss. Atlantis pilot Pamela Melroy is serving as the in-cabin "conductor" of today's spacewalk, helping Wolf and Sellers follow a detailed checklist of activities. "I've gotta tell you guys, I'm looking out the pilot's window and I have the most stupendous view of S1," Melroy radioed just before the spacewalk began. "I feel like I'm way closer to it than I could ever get to you guys in the (simulation training) pool. I feel like I can reach out and touch the CETA cart." "We're just glad you're here," Wolf replied. "It looks like a work of art out there," Melroy said. "Does it look like the (crew) patch? Did we get the patch right?" Sellers joked. "We got the patch right." Looking out the open hatch of the Quest airlock, Sellers marveled, "David, I don't know how to tell you this, but they've made the pool bigger. ... I'm looking stright down, it's a beautiful view of the shuttle and the ground. This is unbelievable." 02:00 p.m., 10/10/02, Update: Spacewalkers on track Today's spacewalk began a bit late, but Piers Sellers and David Wolf, now two hours and 30 minutes into a planned 6.5-hour excursion, are right on track, plowing through a busy timeline with no problems of any significance. Wolf has completed work to hook up a set of electrical cables and data lines between the S1 truss installed on the station earlier today and the S0 truss it's attached to. He now is releasing launch locks that held an S-band antenna in place during launch. The S-band antenna and other gear inside S1 will give the station a redundant satellite communications link with the ground. Sellers, meanwhile, worked on his own to unlatch launch locks that held a set of folding ammonia radiator panels firmly in place along the top of S1. Eighteen radiator beam launch locks must be unlatched, most during today's spacewalk, before the station crew can send commands later in the mission to deploy one of the three folding radiator wings mounted on the trailing face of S1. While waiting for Wolf to unlock the S-band antenna assembly, Sellers spent a few moments unlatching launch locks holding the truss' CETA cart in place. The CETA cart is mounted on rails along the front of the truss that ultimately will be used to carry astronauts back and forth along the beam. A second set of electrical and data jumpers must be connected between S1 and S0 before the new truss element is considered to be in a safe configuration. 03:50 p.m., 10/10/02: Spacewalkers run into minor problems; running about an hour behind schedulea.m. Spacewalkers Piers Sellers and David Wolf ran into minor problems deploying and then locking down an S-band antenna on the S1 solar array truss this afternoon. As a result, they're running about 55 minutes behind schedule. They are 4.5-hours into a planned 6.5-hour spacewalk and it now appears they will forego using the station's robot arm to assist them installing equipment for an external camera group. The astronauts will simply free-float while doing the procedure. A final set of electrical and data cables also must be connected betwen S1 and the S0 truss it's attached to. 06:55 p.m., 10/10/02, Update: Spacewalk ends; objectives accomplished Astronauts David Wolf and Piers Sellers completed a seven-hour one-minute spacewalk today, successfully wiring up a new 14.5-ton $390 million solar array truss segment that was attached to the international space station earlier today. The spacewalk, the 44th devoted to space station assembly and maintenance, began at 11:21 a.m. and ended at 6:22 p.m. Thirty four NASA spacewalkers, one Canadian flier, one Frenchman and seven Russian cosmonauts have now logged 272 hours and 45 minutes building the lab complex dating back to Dec. 7, 1998. Today's spacewalk ran 31 minutes longer than expected, thanks primarily to presumably minor problems switching the station's Canadarm2 space crane from one command "string" to another. The switch over took longer than expected, forcing Wolf to complete installation of a television camera system on the far end of the truss without the assistance of the robot arm. Chief flight director Milt Heflin said the arm glitch occurred when the arm's operating command string was powered down, as required, so Wolf and Sellers could complete hooking up S1's electrical connections. An apparent software glitch prevented engineers from immediately powering the arm back up on its redundant string. Heflin said they eventually succeeded. The original string remains powered down but it is presumably healthy. "We're inside now, cooling down, and we just wanted to thank you for an amazing job of controlling that and making us feel confident all along," Wolf radioed ground controllers from the station's Quest airlock module. "It didn't quite go as planned, but the whole team really came together to pull it off. It was fun working with you." "Thank you very much, Dave, we appreciate those words," said astronaut Stan Love in mission control. "And of course, it was great working with you guys as well. You guys did awesome on that camera install. You saved us!" "I think it was a great team effort," Sellers chimed in. "Incredible. Thanks much." All of the crew's objectives were accomplished. Wolf and Sellers: * Connected two redundant sets of electrical cables between S1 and the central S0 truss segment mounted atop the U.S. Destiny laboratory module; * Connected fiber optic and data cables between the two truss segments; * Released launch locks used to latch down a rotating ammonia radiator support frame during Atlantis' ascent; * Released launch locks on a small rail car that will be used by future spacewalkers to move along the solar array truss; * Coupled the CETA cart to the Canadarm2's mobile base system rail car; * Deployed and secured a redundant S-band antenna; * Deployed a video camera and supporting equipment on S1 that will be used to improve visibility during future spacewalks The only other problem of note came near the end of the excursion when Wolf reported his helmet earphones appeared to be losing power. "OK, if you can hear me I can't hear anybody, I don't think," Wolf radioed. "I can hear you, Dave," Sellers replied. "Dave, can you hear me?" shuttle pilot Pamela Melroy called from Atlantis' flight deck. "Just barely. Both of my earphones are out. If you can hear me well, try to say 'yes' loudly." "Yes!" Sellers yelled. "OK, I barely heard Piers say yes," Wolf reported. "I will get no more complex instructions." "OK," Melroy radioed. Flight controllers then suggested Wolf might have inadvertently bumped his volume controls. In any case, he later seemed to be able to hear normally. The astronauts plan to enjoy a bit of off-duty time Friday before pressing ahead with supply transfers, a Russian media event and an interview with CBS Radio, CNN and Fox. The astronauts are scheduled to go to bed around 8:46 p.m. this evening. Wakeup is scheduled for 4:46 a.m. Friday. The second of three spacewalks to complete S1's outfitting is scheduled for Saturday. =================================================================== Astronauts take time off; CBS News interview (10/11/02) 06:05 a.m., 10/11/02, Update: Crew enjoys light day in space The Atlantis astronauts are working through a light day in space today, enjoying a bit of off-duty time this morning before resuming work to transfer supplies from the shuttle to the international space station. Spacewalkers David Wolf and Piers Sellers, along with flight engineer and spacewalk coordinator Pamela Melroy, will participate in round-robin interviews with CBS Radio, CNN and Fox this afternoon beginning at 2:56 p.m. There are no technical problems of any significance with the shuttle or the space station. Here is an integrated timeline of today's activity (in EDT and mission elapsed time): EDT........DD...HH...MM...EVENT 10/11/02 04:46 AM...03...13...00...STS crew wakeup 05:16 AM...03...13...30...ISS crew wakeup 07:16 AM...03...15...30...ISS daily planning conference 07:31 AM...03...15...45...STS/ISS crew off duty time begins 08:06 AM...03...16...20...ISS: Korzun exercises 09:26 AM...03...17...40...ISS: Treschev exercises 09:46 AM...03...18...00...Melroy exercises 09:46 AM...03...18...00...Nitrogen transfer from shuttle to station 10:06 AM...03...18...20...Logistics transfers begin 10:46 AM...03...19...00...Joint STS/ISS crew meal 11:46 AM...03...20...00...Protein crystal growth transfer to ISS 11:46 AM...03...20...00...Tool configuration 12:01 PM...03...20...15...Ashby exercises 12:26 PM...03...20...40...Yurchikhin exercises 12:30 PM...03...20...44...Mission status briefing on NASA TV 12:46 PM...03...21...00...Soyuz suits/seatliner preps 12:56 PM...03...21...10...Magnus exercises 12:56 PM...03...21...10...ISS: Whitson exercises 01:26 PM...03...21...40...Wolf exercises 01:26 PM...03...21...40...EVA camera setup 01:56 PM...03...22...10...Sellers exercises 02:16 PM...03...22...30...ISS: Korzun exercises 02:56 PM...03...23...10...CBS Radio/CNN/Fox crew interviews 03:46 PM...04...00...00...EVA-2: Procedures review 04:46 PM...04...01...00...ISS daily planning conference 05:01 PM...04...01...15...ISS crew off duty time 05:31 PM...04...01...45...Joint STS/ISS crew meal 07:46 PM...04...04...00...STS/ISS crew sleep begins 08:00 PM...04...04...14...Daily highlight reel airs; repeated hourly 04:00 p.m., 10/11/02, Update: Astronauts, rested from busy spacewalk, ready for second excursion Saturday A software glitch that sidelined the space station's robot arm Thursday forced spacewalkers David Wolf and Piers Sellers to complete a tricky bit of station assembly by hand, a tough job that sent their heart rates soaring to some 170 beats per minute, Wolf said today. The Canadarm2 space crane is healthy and ready for use during a second spacewalk Saturday to continue outfitting the new S1 solar array truss that was attached to the outpost Thursday. But toward the end of the first spacewalk to activate and outfit the truss, the arm had to be shut down as part of planned work to wire the S1 truss into the station's electrical system. When flight controllers attempted to repower the arm using a redundant set of electronics, the arm balked because of a software problem. That forced Wolf to manually carry large television system components to the far end of S1 for installation, putting pressure on him not to bump any delicate equipment along the way. "I'll tell you what, it was pretty tough," Wolf told CBS News today. "That was our backup technique in case such a contingency were to occur and it sure enough happened. The arm's in real good shape for tomorrow, we're planning to use it. We're putting another camera group out tomorrow with the arm, Piers will be mainly doing that. But we got plenty tired (Thursday) and I believe our heart rates got up to over 170 during that task. I think they both did. It took quite a team effort to make that happen." Wolf said he and Sellers are well rested now, however, and ready for their second spacewalk Saturday. "We like doing spacewalks, of course, and we like building more onto this orbiting laboratory, the international space station," Wolf said. "But we'd been in the suits maybe eight to 10 hours at that point, not all of it outside, and (it was) too much of a good thing. But today we're ready to go again and we're looking forward to getting out tomorrow." For first-time flier Sellers, a scientist interested in the interaction of the biosphere and Earth's atmosphere, the busy timeline left little time for sightseeing. But when he did get a chance to enjoy the view from 245 miles up, he was overwhelmed. "We had a long wait in the airlock, about four hours, so everything was calm and peaceful," he reflected. "Then I got to open the hatch and look out and it was dazzling, I was completely knocked out of my socks, which were luckily in my suit. I could see a landscape with clouds and a river and it was just huge, it was fantastic! So for the first five minutes, I was pretty much non-functional, my little brain was overloaded. But I snuck in a few peaks at the scenery during the spacewalk and it's really cool to be working on your hobby while floating over a hurricane. It's just fantastic." Astronaut Sandra Magnus said before launch the shuttle crew hoped to bring a fresh pecan pie to the space station's three-person crew, along with fresh fruit and other treats. She asked reporters to keep the pie a secret and she said today, her station counterparts were delighted with the unexpected gift. "They've enjoyed a lot of the fresh food we brought up," Magnus said. "I appreciate everyone's cooperation in keeping that a surprise for them, it really was a surprise! We're having a special meal together tonight so we may dip into it then or they may choose to save it for a special occasion. But they really appreciated it." Space station commander Valery Korzun, Sergei Treschev and Peggy Whitson were launched to the station in June. They are the fifth full-time crew to live aboard the outpost and as of today, they have logged 128 days in space. "They look great," said Wolf, a physician-astronaut who spent 128 days aboard the Russian Mir space station in 1997 and 1998. "I think the exercise equipment the life science people have gotten up here is working well, it's been a real step from the phase one shuttle-Mir program and they're looking good. Peg is just bouncing on the exercise equipment, hard." Wolf said the Russian and U.S. segments of the station are different, reflecting the design philosophies of both nations, and added that both have different strengths and weaknesses. For Magnus, seeing the station up close and personal has been an eye-opening experience. "The space station is a great place," she said. "I'd seen a lot of pictures so I had an idea what it would look like. But it's not the same as being here. It's just a spectacular place that is huge! Just floating through here and getting a feel for the atmosphere is just spectacular. I mean, here we are orbiting above the Earth like this doing great work with great views and we're working with great people. it's just so much fun!" Added Sellers: "This place is spectacular. You've got to look at it as a real milestone in technical achievement." But Wolf agreed with a reporter that the lab complex needs more than three residents to maximize its scientific potential. The station's current crew size is frozen at three because of budget issues. "It's important that we get up to seven people eventually and get the full capability out of this laboratory," Wolf said. "We have some home runs to hit up in space. ... We have a real vision for the future and it'll take a full up, functioning laboratory so we can operate like we do on the ground. So we look forward to getting up to the full manning. But in the meantime ... we're getting what we can out of it, we're operating at maybe a third power in that regard, but we have a lot more to do to reach the vision." =================================================================== Astronauts stage second spacewalk; continue S1 outfitting (10/12/02) 05:45 a.m., 10/12/02, Update: Second spacewalk on tap Astronauts David Wolf and Piers Sellers are preparing for a planned 6.5-hour spacewalk today to continue outfitting and hooking up the 14.5-ton S1 solar array truss attached to the international space station Thursday. Today's excursion, the 45th spacewalk devoted to space station assembly and maintenance, is scheduled to begin around 10:46 a.m. Wolf and Sellers have four primary objectives: * Connection of fluid lines leading to the S1's ammonia coolant tank assembly. The truss carries a tank assembly loaded with about 600 pounds of ammonia. Connecting these lines will permit ground controllers to run ammonia through the coolant system when it is activated next year; * Finish removal of launch locks holding the CETA cart railcar in place; * Installation of a video camera package on the hull of the Destiny lab module; * Installation of 25 of 31 "spool positioning devices," or SPDs, on all of the ammonia line quick-disconnect fittings currently aboard the station as well as the ones that will be used to connect ammonia lines between S1 and S0, a truss segment installed in April. The goal is to prevent potentially crippling problems on future assembly missions. The 45-foot-long S1 truss is the first outboard segment of the space station's main solar array truss, a 15-foot-wide beam that will stretch some 365 feet when complete. Huge solar panels will be positioned at both ends of the completed truss while ammonia radiators on S1 and a port-side segment scheduled for installation in November - P1 - will dissipate the heat generated by the station's electronics. "We will connect ammonia lines for the cooling system of the space station," Wolf said in a NASA interview. "These are like elephant trunks that carry ammonia from the radiators on the S1 truss to the rest of the space station to cool equipment. We will be doing some repair and maintenance work. So, it's a very mixed bag of activities that we will conduct." Quick-disconnect fittings are used to hook up the ammonia lines between S1 and S0. They also are used on the station's current temporary cooling system, connecting ammonia lines between the P6 solar array and the Z1 truss, both of which extend upward from the station's multi-hatch Unity module. "What we determined in ground testing is that there are two seals in the fluid QDs," said lead spacewalk planner Oscar Koehler. "You can get a build-up of pressure between those QDs because if one of the seals leaks, the other seal will stop that fluid and you'll build up a pressure in there. You have to have a certain number of thermal cycles to raise that pressure to a level where it will basically lock up the QD so when you come to do maintenance later on, you can't get that QD off. "So the work around is to basically take one of those seals out of the loop so if you have a leak - and we're talking very small leaks - you just leak past the other seal, you won't build up that pressure so when we come back to do maintenance, you can get the QD off." The SPDs Wolf and Sellers will attach to each quick-disconnect fitting lock the handle, or bale, used to draw the two sides of a connector together so that only one of the internal seals can engage. "They position the bale, the handle, so the valve is partly open and it's only open enough to take one of those seals out," Koehler said. Additional SPDs will be installed on the next two shuttle missions to protect all of the station's planned coolant line quick-disconnect fittings. For this flight, 24 one-inch-wide SPDs will be installed, six 1.5-inch SPDs and one 0.5-inch SPD. All but two will be installed during today's spacewalk with the final pair installed during the crew's third excursion Monday. The work is important because successfully separating ammonia quick-disconnect fittings could be critical in the event of a future failure. "If at some point we have a radiator leak or we have a radiator get damaged, we can actually remove that radiator and replace it with a new one," Koehler said. "And the QD is what allows you to disconnect your fluid lines from that ORU. Almost all the ORUs that have ammonia going to them outside have the same type of QDs." Ammonia will not flow through S1's thermal control system until a later mission. But six QDs connecting coolant lines running between the Destiny lab module and the station's current radiators on the P6 solar array atop the Z1 truss are pressurized with ammonia. If Wolf and Sellers have any problems installing SPDs on these connectors, they will simply press on with other tasks and astronauts on a future assembly mission will use a special tool to pry any stuck QDs apart as required. Because of the possibility of a leak, both spacewalkers have practiced procedures to remove any residue of the chemical before re-entering the space station. "Ammonia is the primary external coolant in the coolant loops of the space station and there is the potential for it to escape in the various operations we do," Wolf said. "First of all, it is not dangerous immediately to the space suit. The spacesuit can tolerate large amounts of ammonia. We don't want to contaminate the internal atmosphere, of course, when we come in. So it will sublimate or bake off. "We try to get out in the sun first of all. We try to do those tasks early in the EVA so if we get contaminated there will be more time for it to bake off into the vacuum. We have some special brushes to brush it off. We even have detection techniques in the airlock." If any residue is suspected, the astronauts will partially repressurize the airlock, take an air sample, and if necessary, depressurize the airlock again to allow additional time to bake out the chemical. Here is a detailed timeline of today's activity (in EDT and mission elapsed time): EDT........DD...HH...MM...EVENT 10/12/02 03:46 AM...04...12...00...STS crew wakeup 04:16 AM...04...12...30...ISS crew wakeup 05:46 AM...04...14...00...ISS daily planning conference 05:56 AM...04...14...10...EVA (spacewalk) prep begins 06:51 AM...04...15...05...Shuttle boosts station altitude\ 07:01 AM...04...15...15...Quest airlock depress to 10.2 psi 07:46 AM...04...16...00...ISS: Treschev exercises 08:11 AM...04...16...25...ISS: Whitson exercises 08:16 AM...04...16...30...Logistics transfers resume 08:46 AM...04...17...00...EVA-2: Spacesuit purge 08:51 AM...04...17...05...Quest airlock repressurized to 14.7 psi 09:01 AM...04...17...15...EVA-2: Oxygen pre-breathe 09:36 AM...04...17...50...RMS (shuttle robot arm) powerup 10:01 AM...04...18...15...EVA-2: Airlock depressurization 10:46 AM...04...19...00...EVA-2: Airlock egress 10:56 AM...04...19...10...EVA-2: Sortie setup 11:06 AM...04...19...20...ISS: Korzun exercises 11:26 AM...04...19...40...EVA-2: EV1: Z-P6 SPD installation 11:26 AM...04...19...40...EVA-2: EV2: Z1-lab loop A 11:56 AM...04...20...10...EVA-2: EV2: Connect ATA umbilical 12:06 PM...04...20...20...EVA-2: EV1: CETA cart launch locks 12:06 PM...04...20...20...ISS: Midday meal 12:36 PM...04...20...50...EVA-2: EV1/EV2: Lab camera installation 01:16 PM...04...21...30...Yurchikhin exercises 01:51 PM...04...22...05...EVA-2: EV1/EV2: S1/S0 SPD installation 02:41 PM...04...22...55...ISS: Korzun exercises 02:46 PM...04...23...00...Ashby exercises 04:06 PM...05...00...20...EVA-2: EV1/EV2: Keel pin release 04:21 PM...05...00...35...EVA-2: Cleanup 04:51 PM...05...01...05...EVA-2: Airlock ingress 05:11 PM...05...01...25...EVA-2: Airlock repressurization 05:26 PM...05...01...40...RMS powerdown 06:00 PM...05...02...14...Mission status briefing on NASA TV 06:31 PM...05...02...45...ISS daily planning conference 08:46 PM...05...05...00...STS/ISS crew sleep begins 09:00 PM...05...05...14...Daily highlights reel airs on NASA TV "EVA-2 has changed radically from earlier plans," Sellers said in a pre-flight NASA interview. "We were going to be doing a lot more setting up of lights and cameras and things, and we're still doing some of that. But as you probably know, a lot of the quick disconnects, the little junctions between fluid pipes that carry all the cooling all over station, these junctions are, some of them are a little suspect, and we're going to put little plumbing fixes on all, on a lot of them. "Some 30-odd of these little joints have to be looked at and have a little device clipped on there to make sure they behave themselves when you turn your back on them. So, that's going to take up a large chunk of EVA-2." 10:35 a.m., 10/12/02, Update: Spacewalk begins Floating in the space station's Quest airlock module, astronauts David Wolf and Piers Sellers switched their spacesuits to internal battery power at 10:31 a.m. to officially begin the second spacewalk of the shuttle Atlantis' station assembly mission. On Thursday, a 14.5-ton section of the station's main solar array truss was attached to a central truss section, known as S0, already bolted to the top of the U.S. Destiny laboratory module. The new truss, called S1 - the first outboard starboard segment - measures 45 feet long and 15-feet wide. The $390 million S1 truss, and a virtually identical segment scheduled for launch in November, carry ammonia radiators, pumps and coolant lines to help dissipate the heat generated by the station's electronics. Wolf and Sellers connected electrical and data cables between S1 and S0 during a seven-hour and one-minute spacewalk Thursday, deployed an S-band antenna, mounted a television camera package on the the beam and released various clamps that secured critical systems during launch. They also released clamps holding a small astronaut railcar in place. "We're going to go ahead and continue making some more connections today to increase the capability and the communications between the station and this new piece that just came up," said station program manager William Gerstenmaier. "It's a tremendously complex activity." A major item on the agenda today is installation of 25 (out of 31) spool positioning devices, clever mechanisms designed to slightly separate quick-disconnect fittings between ammonia coolant lines on different truss segments. "We have connections where our ammonia lines are plugged together," Gerstenmaier said. "They're called quick disconnects. In that design, there's a dual-seal configuration, where there are two seals to prevent ammonia from leaking from the line to the outside or to space. "What engineers discovered is there's a possibility, well, in fact, it will happen, that all seals, no matter how good they are, have some leakage in them. Over time, over many, many years, a small amount of ammonia will leak from one seal into that cavity between the two seals. "What we learned was that eventually, that space between those two seals will fill with ammonia," Gerstenmaier said. "And when it fills with ammonia, it's like putting water between two devices and when it's in there, it's what we call 'hard packed,' it's full of liquid, and the liquid doesn't have the ability, because there's no nitrogen in it, to do very much from a thermal expansion standpoint. So you put a little bit of heat in there and the pressure goes up very dramatically in that trapped volume of liquid between those two seals, it can go up to a couple of thousand psi. "And what we further found was that that would cause one of the seals to extrude, or be pushed out into an interface and render the quick-disconnect non-functional. It also will, in some case, will actually push the quick-disconnects such that it goes closed. That's an unacceptable situation." More than a hundred such quick-disconnect fittings eventually will be installed on the station. Spacewalking astronauts must be able to unplug and re-connect the fittings for maintenance and to re-position truss elements as assembly proceeds. The seal leakage issue posed a major headache for NASA engineers: How to fix a design flaw in hardware that had already been built? "What we did was, we determined we could build these little spool positioning devices," Gerstenmaier said. "And what it does is, it puts the quick disconnect in an intermediate position so one of the seals is no longer sealing, the seal is bypassed. So then this little cavity that could fill with liquid can no longer fill with liquid. We were able to avoid this high-pressure situation by putting the valve in effectively an intermediate position. So this spool positioning device, what it does is it moves the quick-disconnect halfway between open and closed, moves one of the seals off the sealing surface, and then removes this problem. "Some of the quick disconnects are dry today, they don't have ammonia in them so it's very easy and not much of a concern for us to go ahead and put these clamps, or spool positioning devices, in. But some of the quick-disconnects we'll be operating today are wet and have ammonia in them. "We think very well there could be some of this ammonia in between these two seals, just like I described," Gerstenmaier said. "If that's the case, when the crew goes out to push the button - they have to push a button and then throw the bale to go to this intermediate position - when they go to push that button, we think there'll be a lot of pressure potentially on that button. So it'll be interesting today to see if there's pressure there. "If our theory is right and there's some ammonia in there, we should see some resistance, we should hear some call downs from the crew. ... If we can't do that today because the button's too hard to push, we're building a device like a vise grip that'll be flown on a subsequent flight to actually depress that button. So if we don't get those done today, that's no problem." The S1 ammonia lines will remain until the system is activated next year. The currently "wet" ammonia lines involve the station's interim cooling system mounted on a solar array truss that extends up from the station's Unity module. These are the lines and quick-disconnect fittings that might prove difficult to handle in today's spacewalk. 12:40 p.m., 10/12/02, Update: Ammonia leakage confirmed; corrective clamps installed; spectacular video Spacewalkers David Wolf and Piers Sellers are pressing through their timeline today with no major problems. They have found jammed, pressurized ammonia quick-disconnect fittings as expected, but were able to install pressure-relief devices as planned. The only problem of any significance so far involves an apparently sheared off bolt in a camera pan-and-tilt gimbal mechanism. Flight controllers are assessing what might be done to correct the problem or whether the camera can work properly as is. In initial tests carried out by ground controllers, the camera appeared to move about normally. While those discussions were going on, Wolf took a moment to pan across the station with his helmet camera, providing a truly spectacular view of the shuttle Atlantis suspended in space with the limb of planet Earth in the background. The downlink occurred around 12:15 p.m. "Let me give you a pan, a pan across, if I can, to the shuttle," Wolf said, floating at the far end of the newly installed S1 truss. "Oh boy! Wow!" pilot Pamela Melroy radioed from Atlantis' upper flight deck. "That's gorgeous, folks," someone else chimed in. "All right, so (public affairs officer) Rob Navias owes Dave," Melroy quipped. More spectacular video came down between 12:30 p.m. and 12:40 p.m., showing Sellers floating near the Quest airlock module as the shuttle sailed over the Pacific Ocean just west of Panama. As soon as the spacewalk began, Wolf and Sellers began installing spool positioning devices on ammonia quick-disconnect fittings hooking up coolant lines between the station's P6 solar array truss, the Z1 truss and the Destiny lab module. As expected, a design flaw in the QDs had allowed small internal leaks that caused the fittings to pressurize, making it difficult to open the bales holding the QDs closed. The spool positioning devices, or SPDs, are designed to prevent such pressurization. But to install them, the QD must be slightly loosened. "Now, try both QD buttons and see if either one is harder than the other," Melroy said, reading through the crew's EVA checklist. "F3 is easy and F4 will not push," Wolf radioed. "OK, copy that. You're going to take the hard one first, F4." "Try to release it's pressure," Wolf commented. "That's affirmative, push forward on the bale and see if that relieves the pressure." "That worked," Wolf replied. "And I'm bringing the bale back a little. I felt it burp... OK, now the button is easy." "OK, that's great," Melroy replied. A few moments later, Sellers ran into similar problems. "That button is very, very stiff, I mean it's not moving at all," he reported. "I see access is very difficult, and that's pretty much what we expected," Melroy said. It is believed all of the "wet" QDs have now been equipped with SPDs. 04:45 p.m., 10/12/02, Update: Successful spacewalk ends with all objectives accomplished Astronauts David Wolf and Piers Sellers completed a six-hour four-minute spacewalk today, the second of three required to install, outfit and activate a 14.5-ton solar array truss segment on the international space station. The 45th station assembly spacewalk began at 10:31 a.m. and ended at 4:35 p.m. when Wolf and Sellers began repressurizing the Quest airlock module. The two astronauts have now logged 13 hours and five minutes of spacewalk time through two extravehicular excursions, pushing the total station assembly EVA time to 278 hours and 49 minutes. "Thanks a lot everybody in Houston," Wolf called from the airlock. "It was a good day." "Houston concurs," replied astronaut Stan Love from mission control. "You guys were hot." During today's spacewalk, Sellers and Wolf successfully installed 25 clamp-like devices to prevent ammonia coolant leaks in quick-disconnect fittings; deployed a second television camera platform; completed unlatching numerous locks that secured critical systems during launch; and completed initial activation of an astronaut rail car mounted on the forward face of the S1 truss. The work was completed 25 minutes ahead of schedule. 06:30 p.m., 10/12/02, Update: Mission status briefing; correcting number of quick-disconnect clamps installed Contrary to our most recent status report, spacewalkers David Wolf and Piers Sellers were not able to install two of the two dozen ammonia quick-disconnect clamps today as they originally planned. During a mission status briefing, lead spacewalk planner Oscar Koehler said the two spool positioning devices, or SPDs, in question, located on the station's interim P6 solar array truss, were not equipped with the metal locking collars needed to anchor the SPDs. The collars were added to other ammonia line fittings at the Kennedy Space Center after engineers decided to attach the SPDs to prevent potential leaks. Engineers were unable to gain access to the two QDs in question at the Kennedy Space Center and somehow, that word never made it to Houston. There is no immediate problem with the two fittings in question and engineers will be looking into alternative fixes. It's not clear exactly how many SPDs were, in fact, installed today. Koehler said 22 of 24 were installed while a NASA spokesman said earlier today a total of 25 SPDs were to be installed. Finally, mission operations representative Robert Castle, said shuttle commander Jeffrey Ashby fired Atlantis' maneuvering jets this morning to boost the station's altitude by 3.98 statute miles. Another reboost maneuver is planned later to add an additional 2.4 miles of altitude. The station's current average altitude is 241.7 miles. "Everything in the EVA that needed to get done got done, we're on track for finishing the mission and finishing it on time," Castle said. =================================================================== S1 radiator deploy held yp; Whitson describes life in space (10/13/02) 07:00 a.m., 10/13/02, Update: Radiator deploy, repair work, crew conference on tap The Atlantis astronauts are working through a relatively light day in space today, transferring supplies from the shuttle to the international space station and setting up tools and equipment for a third and final spacewalk Monday. Their three space station counterparts, meanwhile, plan to repair the lab's exercise treadmill among other more routine tasks. The combined crews will participate in a joint news conference, carried live on NASA television, at 2:31 p.m. The most significant activity today from a space station assembly standpoint is deployment of a huge set of ammonia radiator panels on the newly installed S1 solar array truss. The 45-foot-long truss segment is equipped with three folding radiator arrays, each one made up of eight 7.5-foot-wide, 11.5-foot-long panels. When fully extended, each set of panels will extend about 75 feet. The S1 radiators and the cooling they provide will not be needed until the system is activated next year. But the central set of radiator panels will be fully deployed today to make sure there are no mechanical problems. The motor-driven extension is scheduled to begin at 4:16 p.m. and it is expected to take about eight minutes to complete. If the panels fail to unfold for any reason, spacewalkers David Wolf and Piers Sellers could attempt to manually crank them open during their final spacewalk Monday. But no such problems are expected. Here is an updated timeline of today's activities as uplinked to the crew from mission control (in EDT and mission elapsed time): EDT.............DD...HH...MM...EVENT 10/13/02 04:46 AM...05...13...00...STS crew wakeup 05:16 AM...05...13...30...ISS crew wakeup 06:46 AM...05...15...00...ISS daily planning conference 07:16 AM...05...15...30...Russian PAO event 07:31 AM...05...15...45...ISS crew begins TVIS repair 07:46 AM...05...16...00...Magnus exercises 08:31 AM...05...16...45...Melroy exercises 08:41 AM...05...16...55...Quest equipment lock prep 08:46 AM...05...17...00...Logistics transfers resume 09:01 AM...05...17...15...Sellers exercises 09:21 AM...05...17...35...EVA camera setup 09:41 AM...05...17...55...Ashby exercises 10:01 AM...05...18...15...Tool configuration 10:01 AM...05...18...15...PGBA transfer 11:01 AM...05...19...15...Joint STS/ISS crew meal 12:00 PM...05...20...14...Mission status briefing on NASA TV 12:01 PM...05...20...15...Logistics transfers resume 12:01 PM...05...20...15...TVIS repair work resumes 12:01 PM...05...20...15...Quest equipment lock prep resumes 12:01 PM...05...20...15...Logistics transfers resume 12:31 PM...05...20...45...Yurchikhin exercises 02:01 PM...05...22...15...Joint crew photo 02:31 PM...05...22...45...Joint crew news conference 03:01 PM...05...23...15...Logistics transfers resume 03:46 PM...06...00...00...EVA-3: Procedures review 04:16 PM...06...00...30...S1 radiator deploy 04:46 PM...06...01...00...ISS: Whitson exercises 05:31 PM...06...01...45...ISS daily planning conference 07:46 PM...06...04...00...STS/ISS crew sleep begins 08:00 PM...06...04...14...Daily highlights reel airs on NASA TV 04:00 p.m., 10/13/02, Update: Whitson describes life in orbit Astronaut Peggy Whitson, 130 days into a planned 167-day stay in space, says getting callouses on the tops of her feet, relying on her Russian commander to cut her hair and losing her taste for her favorite Earth food - shrimp - are par for the course when it comes to living in space. All in all, Whitson said today, she's having a blast. "I am having a great time up here, it is fun to live here and to do the science," she said. "And as long as I am busy, I'm quite happy to stay. "I do miss my family, I miss my husband and my friends, but it's really great having email, our KU (-band satellite) phone system is great and it allows me to feel like I'm keeping in touch. So I'm doing all right and I'm quite happy to wait" for the shuttle Endeavour's arrival in November to bring her home. Expedition 5 commander Valery Korzun, flight engineer Sergei Treschev and Whitson, the station's science officer, were launched to the lab complex in early June. The shuttle Atlantis' crew, which arrived Wednesday, is the station crew's first visitors since launch. Among the supplies ferried aloft aboard Atlantis were fresh fruit for the Expedition 5 crew and a pecan pie. And, of course, salsa for Whitson. "We can go through quite a bit of salsa in a very short period of time," she joked today. "We choose our meals based on what goes well with salsa! Pretty much everything. We could probably eat paper if we had it with salsa. "Pecan pie is one of the few things that doesn't really need salsa," she joked. "We're really looking forward to finishing that off." Many astronauts report food tastes different in weightlessness and Whitson said she's no different. "One of the things that really interesting, when you come into space your tastes change," she said. "And one of my favorite foods on the ground is shrimp and up here, I can't stand it. The guys like it because they get all my shrimp that I selected on the ground before flight. I'm really hoping my tastes will go back (to normal back on Earth) and I will enjoy shrimp as much as I did before." Whitson operated the station's Canadarm2 space crane to installed a 45-foot-long, 14.5-ton solar array truss segment Thursday. She will help install a virtually identical segment in November before returning to Earth aboard Endeavour. In the meantime, the Expedition 5 crew will entertain more visitors later this month when a three-man crew delivers a new Russian Soyuz lifeboat. Asked if she might like to return to Earth aboard Atlantis, Whitson said "we've got a lot left to do." "We're going to have visitors almost the whole time, so I'm thinking I'm going to be very, very busy for the remainder of the time," she said. "It was so much fun putting on S1, I'm looking forward to putting on the P1 truss (in November). "I haven't really started to count down yet," she said. "Somebody was asking me the other day what my Christmas vacation plans were and I'm like, 'will I be there or not?' It's hard for me to imagine actually being back home because I guess I feel like this is my home right now. Unfortunately, I don't have my husband, but this is my home right now." And what a home it is, moving five miles per second through space some 240 miles up. "It is pretty amazing," shuttle pilot Pamela Melroy, making her second visit to the outpost, said today. "I was just floored at my first view of the station (Wednesday) as we were coming in to rendezvous. I kind of gasped and said 'it's a lot bigger!' I realized it was going to be bigger, but I think the part that amazed me was the solar arrays. "I was looking at them last night out the shuttle window and they fill the entire window, they're so enormous. It was very exciting to add S1 and to start seeing the station expanding again in that direction. Probably the biggest change is having people to hug and kiss when we got on board. It was wonderful." Providing yet another glimpse of life in space, Melroy said being docked to the station brings a few complications for female astronauts. The shuttle's lower deck, normally a dead end, is the crew's path to the station once the two vehicles are docked. "I noticed this morning that even when I'm alone on the middeck, I can't change without checking both directions!" First-time flier Sandra Magnus, Atlantis' flight engineer, provided a colorful glimpse of how one adapts to weightlessness. "It's absolutely amazing," she said. "I was giggling for about two hours after we got up here. At first, I felt this constant motion of being pulled up and I think that's because my muscles were still trying to keep me in sort of a 1 G attitude and I was fighting it. And then after a day or two, you relax and you get used to being in very unusual attitudes. "For example, I tend to like to hang out on the ceiling and be just a little bit off from everybody else because we're in zero G and you can do that," Magnus said. "And then the whole idea of just floating around the lab, it's just a real neat feeling, you feel like a feather, actually, just floating along." Before departing, Magnus may get a chance to try her hand at zero-gravity haircuts. "Valery did an excellent job cutting my hair, I was pretty impressed, thankfully," Whitson said. "I need to ge another haircut, so if we get a little time, Sandy got trained on the ground and she wants to practice with my head." 04:25 p.m., 10/10/02, Update: Radiator panel deployment delayed to Monday Ground controllers ran into minor, but time-consuming problems preparing a set of folded ammonia radiator panels for deployment aboard the international space station today. As a result, deployment of the central set of panels was deferred to 3:52 a.m. Monday, minutes after crew wakeup. Deployment of the radiator array had been targeted for 4:16 p.m., but those plans were put on hold when a protective sensor detected higher-than-expected currents in the array deployment circuitry. As it turned out, there was no problem at all, the sensor had simply been set to a lower-than-needed setting. But by the time the issue was sorted out, the station was moving into darkness, mission controllers were losing their KU-band television link with the lab complex and the crew's day was coming to an end. Because engineers on the ground want to watch the deployment via live television from the station, the unfolding was delayed. Ground controllers did, however, send commands to rotate the large framework holding the folded radiator panels to test its ability to orient the radiators toward deep space as required to maximize heat dissipation. The coolant system in S1 will not be activated until next year. But engineers want to deploy one of the three sets of radiators to test its mechanical operation. =================================================================== Wolf, Sellers stage third EVA to outfit S1 (10/14/02) 04:15 a.m., 10/14/02, Update: S1 radiator deployed Flight controllers sent commands early today that successfully opened one of three huge ammonia radiator wings on the international space station's new S1 solar array truss. As the panel unfolded to its full 75 feet, the crew of the shuttle Atlantis played a recording of the theme from "Mission Impossible" and Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus." "That's very appropriate music," called astronaut Robert Thirsk from space station mission control. "Flight control room people here with big smiles on their faces and singing the words to 'Hallelujah Chorus.' Thanks a lot. ... it's a pretty happy bunch of people." Flight controllers originally planned to deploy the ammonia radiator array Sunday, but delayed the operation after running into a minor technical snag with a safety system. The issue was resolved and the panel began unfolding at 4:01 a.m. today. It extended to its full length within about 10 minutes. The other two radiator arrays on the S1 truss will not be deployed until the cooling system is actived next year. The shuttle crew, meanwhile, is gearing up for a third and final spacewalk later this morning to complete the S1 truss' outfitting and activation. Astronauts Piers Sellers and David Wolf plan to begin the planned six-and-a-half-hour excursion around 10:41 a.m. In addition, shuttle commander Jeffrey Ashby will fire Atlantis' maneuvering jets for about 35 minutes to boost the station's altitude by about a mile and a half. The reboost maneuver is scheduled to begin at 7:21 a.m. 06:30 a.m., 10/14/02, Update: Astronauts gear up for final spacewalk Astronauts David Wolf and Piers Sellers are gearing up for a third and final spacewalk today, a planned 6.5-hour excursion to complete the outfitting of the S1 solar array truss attached to the international space station last Thursday. The spacewalk, the 46th devoted to space station assembly and maintenance, is scheduled to begin around 10:45 a.m. Today's excursion has four primary objectives: * Connection of ammonia jumpers between the S1 and S0 truss segments; * Removal of two keel pin assemblies that were used to help hold S1 in the shuttle's cargo bay for launch; * Installation of six final "spool positioning devices," or SPDs, on ammonia line quick-disconnect fittings. The SPDs are needed to prevent potential leaks and internal pressurization that might cause QDs to lock together; * Repair or replacement, if necessary, of a cable cutter on Canadarm2 space crane's mobile base system, which carries the robot arm back and forth along the solar array truss. Independent spool-fed power and video lines play out as required as the mobile base system cart moves along, providing power between work stations. Should a spool jam when the cart is between work stations, cable cutters are in place to cut the stuck line. That would allow the cart and the robot arm to reach the next work station where the cart could plug into a power socket. During installation of S0 in April, a safing bolt in one of the "interface umbilical assemblies," used to prevent inadvertent activation of a cable cutter during launch, failed to back out when spacewalkers attempted to remove it. Both of the cable cutters must be operational to complete assembly of the truss. "If you're moving the mobile transporter and it gets stuck between work sites, cutting the cable allows you to move to the next worksite," said spacewalk planner Oscar Koehler. "There are different failures that can cause that cable to jam in its reel. The other one would still be reeling out. So you cut the one cable, use the other one to give you power to get out to your next work site to plug in. It gives you the power you need to keep the mobile transporter alive." Wolf and Sellers plan to use a much higher torque setting to free the stuck bolt and if that doesn't work, they will replace the entire umbilical assembly. That job, should it be necessary, would take about an hour and a half to complete. "I'd say putting on the interface umbilical assembly, which is under the mobile base system, is one of our more difficult tasks procedurally," Wolf said before launch. Here is a detailed description of today's spacewalk from the NASA press kit: ----------------------------- After the 30-minute setup period, the first job on the flight's final spacewalk is removal and replacement of the Interface Umbilical Assembly (IUA). The IUA is installed with the Trailing Umbilical System (TUS) on the Mobil Transporter (MT), the railcar that supports the base for the station's robotic arm. The TUS incorporates a reel for the trailing umbilical, a power and data cable linking the station and the MT as it moves along the tracks on the truss. Program officials decided to replace the IUA after a bolt securing a backup cable cutter could not be removed during its initial installation on the STS-110 mission last April. Wolf and Sellers will move from the airlock to the MT, on the tracks of S0. They first will remove the TUS cable, with Sellers keeping it under tension while being careful not to bend or crimp it. Wolf will loosen three cable connections, then remove the cable cutter before temporarily stowing the TUS cable. To remove the IUA itself, Wolf detaches four cable connections linking it to the MT. Then Sellers, using a pistol grip tool, removes four bolts attaching the IUA assembly to the MT. Finally he removes the IUA from its Òsoft dockÓ connection and hands it to Wolf. Installation of the new IUA is basically the same operation in reverse, with Sellers soft docking the new unit and attaching it to the MT with four bolts. Wolf then makes the seven connections between the IUA, the MT and the TUS. Wolf and Sellers move to a point at the junction of S0 and S1 for the next activity, a onehour, 25-minute installation of fluid jumpers to enable ammonia coolant to flow between the two truss segments. Sellers releases two jumpers on S0, then moves into the Canadarm2 foot restraint for a ride to the jumper install position at the lower segment-to-segment utility carrier. There he will join Wolf, waiting nearby in a portable foot restraint. Wolf will mate and install SPDs on two jumper connections on the S0 side, while Sellers performs a similar task on the S1 side. Each connection will involve a pull test and a threeminute leak check. Wolf reinstalls thermal covers while Sellers closes S1 and S0 utility tray shrouds. Then Sellers, still on the arm, and Wolf, move on to S1's port drag link. They will work together to release that drag link, a large metal rod used as a launch restraint. Wolf will release a bolt attaching the drag link to the keel, while Sellers releases a similar bolt attaching the drag link to S1. Sellers takes the drag link to its stowage location on the S1 framework and attaches it. While Sellers attaches the drag link, Wolf moves to the port keel pin, another launch support device, first tightening two keel scissor bolts, then releasing two keel pin bolts and rotating keel pin latches free. Once rotated Wolf reinstalls the bolt, removes two pit-pins. Sellers reinstalls the keel pin a nearby. The processes are repeated on the S1 starboard drag link and keel pin. Wolf and Sellers, now off the arm, will move to the CETA handrail cart where each will take a 1.5 -inch SPD to be installed on ammonia lines near a Thermal Radiator Rotary Joint on S0. Wolf will release bolts securing that joint in its launch position. The last task is to perform a test of the Segment-to-Segment Attachment System (SSAS) at the outboard end of S1. The SSAS there consists of a remotely operated claw and three motorized bolt assemblies. Wolf will depress ready to latch indicators on each for several seconds. This will verify the readiness of the S1 segment to receive other starboard truss components on future flights. Finally, while Wolf does the SSAS test, Sellers will reconfigure the Squib Firing Unit (SFU) power connector. The SFU is used to release radiator panels for deployment. A final 30-minute cleanup period will precede the entry of both spacewalkers into the airlock and its repressurization to complete the mission's final spacewalk. Here is an updated timeline of today's activities (in EDT and mission elapsed time): EDT.............DD...HH...MM...EVENT 10/14/02 03:46 AM...06...12...00...STS crew wakeup 04:01 AM...06...12...15...Radiator panel deploy 04:16 AM...06...12...30...ISS crew wakeup 05:46 AM...06...14...00...ISS daily planning conference 05:56 AM...06...14...10...EVA prep begins 06:31 AM...06...14...45...Logistics transfers resume 06:31 AM...06...14...45...TVIS checkout and setup 06:56 AM...06...15...10...Quest airlock depress to 10.2 psi 07:21 AM...06...15...35...Reboost config 3 07:41 AM...06...15...55...ISS: Whitson exercises 08:46 AM...06...17...00...EVA-3: EMU purge 08:51 AM...06...17...05...Quest airlock repressurized to 14.7 psi 09:01 AM...06...17...15...EVA-3: Oxygen pre-breathe 09:26 AM...06...17...40...Magnus exercises 10:01 AM...06...18...15...EVA-3: Airlock depressurization 10:46 AM...06...19...00...EVA-3: Egress 10:46 AM...06...19...00...ISS: Korzun exercises 10:46 AM...06...19...00...Yurchikhin exercises 10:56 AM...06...19...10...EVA-3: Sortie setup 11:26 AM...06...19...40...EVA-3: IUA R&R 12:41 PM...06...20...55...EVA-3: Connect S1-S0 FLD JP 01:46 PM...06...22...00...Ashby exercises 02:06 PM...06...22...20...EVA-3: Remove port keel pin 02:46 PM...06...23...00...EVA-3: Remove starboard keel pin 02:51 PM...06...23...05...ISS: Korzun exercises 03:26 PM...06...23...40...EVA-3: TRRJ SPDs 03:51 PM...07...00...05...EVA-3: EV2: SFU config 04:01 PM...07...00...15...ISS: Treschev exercises 04:21 PM...07...00...35...EVA-3: Sortie cleanup 04:51 PM...07...01...05...EVA-3: Airlock ingress 05:11 PM...07...01...25...EVA-3: Airlock repressurization 06:00 PM...07...02...14...Mission status briefing on NASA television 06:16 PM...07...02...30...ISS daily planning conference 08:46 PM...07...05...00...STS/ISS crew sleep begins 09:00 PM...07...05...14...Daily video highlights reel airs on NASA TV 10:15 a.m., 10/14/02, Update: Spacewalk begins Running a half hour ahead of schedule, astronauts David Wolf and Piers Sellers, floating in the international space station's Quest airlock module, switched their spacesuits to internal battery power at 10:11 a.m. to officially begin the third and final spacewalk of Atlantis' mission. This is the 46th spacewalk devoted to space station assembly and maintenance, the 12th staged from the Quest airlock module and the 21st conducted from the station. Going into today's excursion, 34 NASA astronauts, one Canadian, one Frenchman and seven Russian cosmonauts had logged 278 hours and 49 minutes of spacewalk time building the international space station. Sellers and Wolf logged 13 hours and five minutes of spacewalk time during excursions Thursday and Saturday to outfit and activate the new S1 solar array truss segment. They plan to finish their work today. 11:00 a.m., 10/14/02, Update: Astronauts free jammed cable cutter bolt Spacewalkers David Wolf and Piers Sellers quickly freed a stuck safetly bolt in a critical emergency cable cutter on the international space station today, allowing the astronauts to forego a complex job to remove and replace the entire bolt cutter assembly. Before launch, Wolf said replacing the interface umbilical assembly represented the most complex single task planned for any of their three spacewalks. With the successful retraction of a bolt that was preventing the device from working properly, the spacewalkers are now pressing ahead with other tasks. The IUA is part of a system that allows ribbon cables providing power and data to the motorized rail car carrying the station's robot arm to play out and reel in as the arm is moved along the station's main solar array truss. Two cable cutters are in place to slice through either cable should one get jammed while the arm is between work sites. By removing the stuck safing bolt, Sellers and Wolf eliminated any chance of an inadvertent firing that could sever a healthy cable. 05:50 p.m., 10/14/02, Update: Third and final spacewalk ends Astronauts David Wolf and Piers Sellers began repressurizing the international space station's Quest airlock module at 4:47 p.m., officially ending the third and final spacewalk of shuttle Atlantis' mission. The only snag of any significance during today's work involved one of 10 ammonia line quick-disconnect fitting clamps that could not be firmly attached. All other objectives were met. Today's spacewalk, the 46th in the history of space station construction, began at 10:11 a.m. With the conclusion of today's outing, 43 astronauts and cosmonauts have logged 285 hours and 25 minutes building and maintaining the lab complex. "We're currently on schedule with all of our activities and all of our goals being accomplished," said Robert Castle, mission operations representative at the Johnson Space Center. "There are no plans to extend the mission. ... Weather permitting, we'll be landing at the Kennedy Space Center on Friday morning." =================================================================== Astronauts wrap up station work (10/15/02) The combined crews of the shuttle Atlantis and the international space station are working through a final full day of docked activity, enjoying a bit of off-duty time, wrapping up a few final cargo transfers and readying both spacecraft for undocking Wednesday. Here is an updated timeline of today's activity as uplinked from mission control (in EDT and mission elapsed time): EDT........DD...HH...MM...EVENT 10/15/02 04:46 AM...07...13...00...STS crew wakeup 05:16 AM...07...13...30...ISS crew wakeup 06:46 AM...07...15...00...ISS daily planning conference 07:21 AM...07...15...35...ISS: Off-duty time begins 07:55 AM...07...16...09...Shuttle crew off-duty time begins 09:16 AM...07...17...30...ISS: Korzun exercises 09:46 AM...07...18...00...ISS: Whitson exercises 10:16 AM...07...18...30...ISS: Treschev exercises 10:46 AM...07...19...00...ISS: Whitson exercises 11:46 AM...07...20...00...Joint crew meal 12:00 PM...07...20...14...Mission status briefing on NASA television 12:46 PM...07...21...00...Magnus exercises 12:46 PM...07...21...00...Nitrogen transfer termination 01:16 PM...07...21...30...Yurchikhin exercises 01:46 PM...07...22...00...CGBA experiment transfer 01:46 PM...07...22...00...Melroy exercises 01:46 PM...07...22...00...CCAA water sep R&R 02:16 PM...07...22...30...Wolf exercises 02:31 PM...07...22...45...Radiator photos 02:46 PM...07...23...00...Rendezvous tools checkout 03:01 PM...07...23...15...Logistics transfers resume 03:16 PM...07...23...30...ISS: Korzun exercises 03:46 PM...08...00...00...Sellers exercises 04:16 PM...08...00...30...Ashby exercises 05:01 PM...08...01...15...ISS daily planning conference 07:46 PM...08...04...00...STS/ISS crew sleep begins 08:00 PM...08...14...14...Daily video highlights reel airs on NASA TV if all goes well, Atlantis will undock from the international space station around 9:14 a.m. Wednesday. Pilot Pamela Melroy will guide the shuttle to a point 450 feet directly in front of the station before initiating a one-and-a-quarter-loop photo-documentation flyaround. A final separation burn is targeted for 10:57 a.m. Here's the timeline: TIME.......DD...HH...MM...EVENT 10/16/02 08:54 AM...08...17...08...Noon 09:10 AM...08...17...24...Russian ground station AOS 09:14 AM...08...17...28...UNDOCKING 09:14 AM...08...17...28...Initial orbiter separation (+10 seconds) 09:15 AM...08...17...29...ISS holds current attitude 09:17 AM...08...17...31...Russian ground station LOS 09:18 AM...08...17...32...Range: 50 feet; reselect -X jets 09:21 AM...08...17...35...Range: 75 feet; low-Z jets 09:24 AM...08...17...38...Sunset 09:28 AM...08...17...42...Range: 150 feet 09:57 AM...08...18...11...Sunrise 10:00 AM...08...18...14...Range: 450 feet; begin flyaround 10:11 AM...08...18...25...Shuttle directly above ISS (-Rbar) 10:23 AM...08...18...37...Shuttle directly behind ISS (-Vbar) 10:27 AM...08...18...41...Noon 10:34 AM...08...18...48...Shuttle directly below ISS (+Rbar) 10:46 AM...08...19...00...Shuttle directly in front of ISS (+Vbar) 10:56 AM...08...19...10...Sunset 10:57 AM...08...19...11...Final separation burn 10:57 AM...08...19...11...Shuttle directly above ISS (-Rbar) 11:30 AM...08...19...44...Sunrise =================================================================== Shuttle undocks from space station (10/16/02) 07:15 a.m., 10/16/02, Update: Crews bid farewell; shuttle-station undocking on tap The Atlantis astronauts bid farewell to the crew of the international space station today, setting the stage for undocking at 9:13 a.m. to close out a successful assembly mission. In a brief farewell ceremony, the two crews gathered in the U.S. Destiny laboratory module to exchange hugs and handshakes after a busy week of work to attach a new solar array truss segment to the station complex. "I didn't know it was going to be so hard (to say goodbye)," one of the Atlantis astronauts said before leaving the station for the last time. A few moments later, at 7:15 a.m., shuttle commander Jeffrey Ashby closed a final hatch between the two spacecraft. With pilot Pamela Melroy at the controls, Atlantis is scheduled to undock at 9:13 a.m. She will guide the space shuttle to a point about 450 feet directly in front of the station before beginning a photo-documentation fly around. "We're going to be doing a slightly abbreviated fly around," said flight director Phil Engelauf. "We will separate from in front of the station on the plus v-bar, we call it, and we'll do a normal separation out to about a 450-foot radius and we'll start a fly around going up, over the top of the station. "If we were going to do no fly around, we would do a separation burn when we were directly over the top of the station at about 500 feet. In this case, we're going to continue on around another 180 degrees until we're directly underneath the station. And then we'll do about a one-and-a-half-foot-per-second sep burn at that point. "The resulting motion, because that's a posigrade burn, will bring us a little farther out in front of the station, but we'll still go up and over the top of the station again. And when we get directly above the station, we'll do another burn of about a foot-and-a-half per second and that will be the final separation maneuver that will move us out of the vicinity of the station." The final separation maneuver is expected around 11 a.m. The goal of the fly around is two-fold: To provide photo documentation of the station in its current state, which includes the new S1 solar array truss segment; and to give Melroy hands-on flying time with the shuttle. The photo documentation is not mandatory, but "it's highly desireable," Engelauf said. "It also serves to some degree as real, hands-on-the-stick piloting training time," he said. "We typically have the pilot fly the fly-around procedure. Usually, the commanders do the bulk of the critical flying during the missions and this gives the pilot the opportunity to get some real stick time before they eventually become commanders and are doing critical operations themselves." During Melroy's previous flight, the shuttle's KU-band radar system malfunctioned and the fly around was called off. "This is her second opportunity and we wanted to do what we could to make sure we got that opportunity for her, in addition to getting the photographic objectives as well," Engelauf said. Atlantis docked with the station last Wednesday. The next day, during the first of three spacewalks by astronauts David Wolf and Piers Sellers, the new S1 truss segment was attached. Along with outfitting and activating the $390 million component, the shuttle crew also delivered 1,855 pounds of supplies, equipment and scientific hardware, along with more than 1,300 pounds of fresh water. Another 1,800 pounds of no-longer-needed equipment was transferred from the station to Atlantis for return to Earth. Virtually all of the crew's objectives have been accomplished and the major components of the S1 truss successfully checked out. "So far, the mission is going great, the crew is just doing an outstanding job and everything so far has met all of our expectations and in most cases, has exceeded those expectations," Engelauf said. This afternoon, the shuttle crew will operate an experiment called SHIMMER and participate in round-robin media interviews beginning at 1:39 p.m. "After we've undocked, we have the normal shuttle entry preparation activities, but in addition we have a secondary payload on this flight called SHIMMER," Engelauf said. "I confess, I even have to look up the name of this particular payload. It stands for 'Spatial Heterodyne Imager for Mesospheric Radicals.' It's an Air Force-sponsored payload that requires a little bit of out-the-window pointing for the shuttle to take some spectral images. "This payload is essentially a demonstration of a new remote sensing technique using ultraviolet wavelengths in mapping hydroxyl in density distributions, which would be useful mapping the ozone layer and the chemical hydroxyl, which is largely responsible for the breakdown ozone." Here is an updated timeline of today's activities (in EDT and mission elapsed time): EDT........DD...HH...MM...EVENT 10/16/02 03:46 AM...08...12...00...STS crew wakeup 04:16 AM...08...12...30...ISS crew wakeup 06:16 AM...08...14...30...ISS daily planning conference 06:31 AM...08...14...45...Melroy exercises 06:46 AM...08...15...00...Hatch closing 07:01 AM...08...15...15...ISS: Treschev exercises 07:06 AM...08...15...20...Leak checks 07:26 AM...08...15...40...Yurchikhin exercises 08:11 AM...08...16...25...Group B computer powerup 08:31 AM...08...16...45...Undocking timeline begins 08:46 AM...08...17...00...ISS crew prepares PMA-2 for departure 09:13 AM...08...17...27...UNDOCKING 09:59 AM...08...18...13...Begin flyaround 10:11 AM...08...18...25...ISS: Whitson exercises 10:31 AM...08...18...45...ISS: Korzun exercises 11:04 AM...08...19...18...Separation burn 11:10 AM...08...19...24...Mission status briefing on NASA television 11:16 AM...08...19...30...Group B computer powerdown 11:21 AM...08...19...35...SHIMMER setup and activation 11:31 AM...08...19...45...ISS midday meal 11:31 AM...08...19...45...Videotape replay of undocking 11:46 AM...08...20...00...Ashby exercises 11:46 AM...08...20...00...Post undocking laptop computer config 11:56 AM...08...20...10...SHIMMER limb observations 12:16 PM...08...20...30...Sellers exercises 12:31 PM...08...20...45...ISS crew off duty time begins 12:36 PM...08...20...50...SHIMMER moon observations 12:41 PM...08...20...55...ISS crew depressurizes PMA2 01:01 PM...08...21...15...SHIMMER deactivation 01:39 PM...08...21...53...PAO event with Ashby, Melroy, Yurchikhin 01:46 PM...08...22...00...ISS: Whitson exercises 01:56 PM...08...22...10...Magnus exercises 02:01 PM...08...22...15...ISS: Korzun exercises 02:16 PM...08...22...30...SHIMMER stow 02:46 PM...08...23...00...Wolf exercises 03:31 PM...08...23...45...ISS: PMA2 leak checks 07:16 PM...09...03...30...STS crew sleep begins 08:00 PM...09...04...14...Daily video highlights reel airs on NASA TV 09:15 a.m., 10/16/02, Update: Shuttle Atlantis undocks from space station/B> The shuttle Atlantis undocked from the international space station today, ending a week of docked operations highlighted by the attachment of a 14.5-ton solar array truss segment. With pilot Pamela Melroy at the controls, powerful springs in the shuttle-station docking mechanism gently pushed Atlantis away at 9:13 a.m. "Houston and Alpha, (this is) Atlantis. Physical separation, executing sep burn," commander Jeffrey Ashby radioed. Following naval tradition, station astronaut Peggy Whitson then rang a ship's bell aboard the lab complex, radioing "Atlantis, departing." "We want to stay, we want to stay!" shuttle crew members jokingly yelled in the background during otherwise routine radio chatter between Atlantis and mission control before undocking. But it was not to be. Melroy, who says she decided to be an astronaut when she was 11 years old, plans to fly Atlantis through a looping photo-documentation fly around before leaving the area for good around 11 a.m. See the 7:15 a.m. status report below for details. =================================================================== Astronauts test re-entry systems, prepare for home (10/17/02) The Atlantis astronauts are working through their pre-landing timeline today, testing the shuttle's navigation and maneuvering systems, stowing no-longer-needed equipment and conducting a few final runs with an atmospheric observation experiment. With forecasters predicting ideal conditions, commander Jeffrey Ashby plans to fire Atlantis' twin braking rockets at 10:36:15 a.m. Friday to set up a landing on runway 33 at the Kennedy Space Center at 11:44:06 a.m. Shortly after 8 a.m. today, Ashby and pilot Pamela Melroy will check out the shuttle's re-entry systems, firing up one of the ship's hydraulic power plants, testing the movement of aerosurfaces and making sure cockpit instrumentation is working properly. They also will test fire Atlantis' small steering jets in a routine pre-entry check. Their crewmates, meanwhile - Sandra Magnus, Piers Sellers, David Wolf and cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin - will be tidying up the shuttle's cabin, stowing loose gear, laptop computers and local area network equipment. All of the astronauts will put in a final round of exercise and all will participate in a final set of round-robin media interviews beginning at 12:46 p.m. Later in the afternoon, Ashby and Melroy will take turns flying a sophisticated shuttle landing simulator to sharpen their piloting skills before the real thing on Friday. Atlantis' re-entry will begin 249 miles above the central Indian Ocean. Flying upside down and backwards, Ashby and Melroy will fire the shuttle's twin orbital maneuvering system rockets for one minute 58 seconds starting at 10:36:15 a.m., slowing the ship by 152 mph. That will lower the far side of the shuttle's orbit deep into the atmosphere above the Kennedy Space Center. After a 36-minute freefall, Atlantis will hit the discernible atmosphere at an altitude of 399,200 feet above the south Pacific Ocean. From there, Atlantis' ground track will carry the astronauts above Central America and the western tip of Cuba before crossing the west coast of Florida south of Tampa. Taking over manual control at an altitude of 50,000 feet above the Kennedy Space Center, Ashby will guide Atlantis through a sweeping 287-degree right overhead turn to line up on runway 33. Touchdown is expected around 11:44:06 a.m. to close out a 4.5-million-mile voyage spanning 170 complete orbits since blastoff Oct. 7. Here is an updated timeline of today's activity as uplinked from mission control (in EDT and mission elapsed time): EDT........DD...HH...MM...EVENT 10/17/02 03:16 AM...09...11...30...STS crew wakeup 06:16 AM...09...14...30...Cabin stow begins 06:31 AM...09...14...45...SHIMMER setup and activation 07:01 AM...09...15...15...SHIMMER moon observations 07:16 AM...09...15...30...Melroy exercises 07:36 AM...09...15...50...SHIMMER limb observations 07:56 AM...09...16...10...SHIMMER deactivation and stow 08:16 AM...09...16...30...Flight control system checkout 08:46 AM...09...17...00...Yurchikhin exercises 09:16 AM...09...17...30...Sellers exercises 09:26 AM...09...17...40...Reaction control system hotfire 10:01 AM...09...18...15...Ashby exercises 11:01 AM...09...19...15...L-1 comm checks 11:16 AM...09...19...30...Crew meal 12:16 PM...09...20...30...On-board de-orbit review 12:46 PM...09...21...00...PAO event with entire crew 01:06 PM...09...21...20...Cabin stow resumes 01:06 PM...09...21...20...Magnus exercises 01:15 PM...09...21...29...Mission status briefing on NASA television 01:46 PM...09...22...00...Wolf exercises 01:56 PM...09...22...10...PILOT landing simulator practice (Melroy) 02:06 PM...09...22...20...L-1 comm checks (part 2) 02:31 PM...09...22...45...PILOT landing practice (As) 03:46 PM...10...00...00...Ergometer stow 04:01 PM...10...00...15...PGSC stow 04:26 PM...10...00...40...OMS orbit adjust rocket firing 07:16 PM...10...03...30...STS crew sleep begins =================================================================== Atlantis returns to Earth (10/18/02) 07:15 a.m., 10/18/02, Update: Shuttle landing on tap With forecasters predicting near perfect weather, the Atlantis astronauts are preparing the shuttle for re-entry and landing this morning to close out a successful 11-day space station assembly mission. The astronauts were awakened at 3:25 a.m. by a recording of "Someday Soon" by Suzy Bogus. "Atlantis, Houston; good morning," called astronaut Stephanie Wilson from mission control. "That was 'Someday Soon' for Jeff from (his wife) Paige. And Paige says, 'see you in a few hours, sweetie; have a safe trip back to Earth.'" "Thank you, Stephanie," replied commander Jeffrey Ashby. "It's a beautiful day in low-Earth orbit. And we're looking forward to bringing Atlantis home today to a safe landing and to see our families." "And we're looking forward to that as well, Atlantis. Weather still looks good." Ashby and his five crewmates - pilot Pamela Melroy, Sandra Magnus, Piers Sellers, David Wolf and cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin - have two opportunities to land today at the Kennedy Space Center. But there are no technical problems of any significance with the shuttle and with ideal weather expected, Ashby is expected to guide Atlantis to a touchdown on runway 33 at the Florida spaceport at 11:44 a.m. "Again, the weather forecast for the Kennedy Space Center is virtually perfect this morning, no clouds, unrestricted visibility and light winds expected to greet commander Jeff Ashby and his five crew members," said mission control commentator Rob Navias. Here is a detailed timeline of today's entry activities (in EDT): TIME.......EVENT 06:39 AM...Begin deorbit timeline 07:01 AM...Mission specialists seat installation 07:07 AM...Computers set for deorbit prep 07:11 AM...Hydraulic system configured fpr emtru 07:36 AM...Flash evaporator checkout 07:42 AM...Final payload deactivation 07:56 AM...Payload bay doors closed 08:06 AM...Mission control 'go' for OPS-3 entry software load 08:16 AM...OPS-3 transition 08:41 AM...Entry switchlist verification 08:51 AM...Deorbit maneuver update 08:56 AM...Crew entry review 09:11 AM...Commander, pilot don entry suits 09:28 AM...IMU navigation system alignment 09:36 AM...Commander, pilot strap in; others don suits 09:53 AM...Shuttle steering check 09:56 AM...APU hydraulic system prestart 10:03 AM...Toilet deactivation 10:11 AM...Payload bay vent doors closed for entry 10:16 AM...Mission control 'go' for deorbit burn 10:22 AM...Mission specialists seat ingress 10:31 AM...Single hydraulic power unit start 10:36:15...Deorbit rocket firing begins Altitude: 248.6 miles Duration of burn: One minute 58 seconds Change in velocity: 152 mph Location: Above the central Indian Ocean Orbit: 170 10:38:13...Deorbit burn complete 11:07 AM...TDRS-West comsat acquisition of signal 11:12 AM...Atlantis hits the discernible atmosphere (entry interface) Altitude: 75.4 miles Location: South Pacific Ocean Range to touchdown: 4,992 statute miles 11:17 AM...22-degree right roll to reduce velocity 11:24 AM...65-degree left roll to reduce velocity 11:37 AM...Velocity less than mach 2.5 Altitude: 85,400 feet Location: Above central Florida 11:39 AM...Velocity less than mach 1 Altitude: 51,200 feet Location: Above Kennedy Space Center 11:40 AM...Shuttle begins banking to line up on runway 33 Altitude: 42,900 feet Turn angle: 287 degree right overhead turn 11:44:06...Landing on runway 33 Orbit: 171 (partial) Mission duration: 10/19:58:15 Miles flown: 4.5 million Should a technical problem of some sort or an unexpected change in the weather force a one-orbit delay, here is the timeline for the crew's second landing opportunity: TIME.......EVENT 11:55 AM...MCC 'go' for deorbit burn 12:01 PM...MS seat ingress 12:10 PM...Single APU start 12:15:37...Deorbit ignition 12:17:38...Deorbit ignition complete 12:43 PM...AOS TDRS-West 12:48 PM...Entry interface 12:53 PM...6-degree right roll command 01:10 PM...43-degree roll reversal 01:14 PM...Velocity less than mach 2.5 01:16 PM...Velocity less than mach 1 01:17 PM...Shuttle on the HAC 01:20:32...Landing 10:40 a.m., 10/18/02, Update: Shuttle braking rockets fired; descent to landing begins Flying upside down and backward over the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia, shuttle commander Jeffrey Ashby fired Atlantis' twin braking rockets this morning, slowing the ship enough to drop out of orbit for a landing at the Kennedy Space Center. The OMS engines ignited on time at 10:36:14 a.m. and shut down two minutes and 12 seconds later after slowing Atlantis by about 171 mph. That's not much compared to the shuttle's 17,200 mph orbital velocity, but it was enough to lower the far side of Atlantis' orbit deep into the atmosphere above Florida's east coast. After a 36-minute freefall, Atlantis will hit the discernible atmosphere at an altitude of 399,200 feet - 74 miles - above the south Pacific Ocean around 11:12 a.m. From there, Atlantis' ground track will carry the astronauts above Central America and the western tip of Cuba before crossing the west coast of Florida south of Tampa. Taking over manual control at an altitude of 50,000 feet above the Kennedy Space Center, Ashby will guide Atlantis through a sweeping 291-degree right overhead turn to line up on runway 33. Touchdown is expected a few seconds past 11:44 a.m. to close out a 4.5-million-mile voyage spanning 170 complete orbits since blastoff Oct. 7. This status report will be updated after Atlantis lands or as conditions warrant. 12:15 p.m., 10/18/02, Update: Atlantis returns to Earth The shuttle Atlantis dropped out of a beautiful fall sky today and settled to a slightly windy touchdown on runway 33 at the Kennedy Space Center to close out an 11-day space station assembly mission spanning 170 orbits and 4.5 million miles since blastoff Oct. 7. Making his first hands-on landing, first-time shuttle commander Jeffrey Ashby took over manual control of the shuttle five minutes before touchdown as the spaceplane passed through 50,000 feet above the Florida spaceport. After giving pilot Pamela Melroy a few moments of stick time, Ashby took over and guided Atlantis through a sweeping 291-degree right-overhead turn to line up on runway 33 before settling to a high speed touchdown at 11:43:40 a.m. "Atlantis, welcome back to Earth and congratulations on a truly spectacular mission expanding our new home in space," called astronaut Ken Ham from mission control in Houston. Mission duration was 10 days 19 hours 57 minutes and 49 seconds. Landings......KSC.......EAFB......WSSH.......Total Night.........14........5.........0..........19 Daylight......46........44........1..........91 Total.........60........49........1..........110 Most Recent...10/18/02..06/19/02..03/30/82 Ashby, Melroy, flight engineer Sandra Magnus, cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and spacewalkers David Wolf and Piers Sellers plan to spend the night in Florida before flying back to the Johnson Space Center on Saturday. "This mission was 100 percent successful, we did complete all of our objectives and in addition to that, we completed some of the objectives we had for the next flight," said Linda Ham, a member of NASA's mission management team. The international space station was sailing 249 miles above the southern Indian Ocean as Atlantis was landing half a world away, its three-person crew busy stowing supplies and equipment ferried to the outpost by the shuttle crew. Early this morning, Russian ground controllers fired thrusters on a Progress supply craft docked to the station's aft port to boost the lab's altitude by about 6.9 miles. Along with increasing the station's altitude, the burn also was intended to fine-tune the orbit for the arrival of a manned Soyuz spacecraft Oct. 30. Three-seat Soyuz spacecraft serve as lifeboats for the space station and they must be replaced every six months. The lab's current lifeboat is nearing the end of its certified orbital lifetime and a fresh spacecraft, carrying commander Sergei Zalyotin, flight engineer Yuri Lonchakov and Belgian astronaut Frank DeWinne, is scheduled for launch Oct. 28. But today's reboost rocket firing on the station did not achieve the expected results and the change in velocity came up short by 4.47 mph. It is not yet known whether the shortfall will cause any problems for the planned launch of the Soyuz "taxi" crew on Oct. 28. That launch date already was in question because of the explosion of a similar unmanned rocket earlier this week. But a Russian Space Agency press release today said the launching would proceed on schedule. Ham said she expected to hear from the Russians early next week. Atlantis' return to Earth today capped a near perfect space station assembly flight. This was the: 111th....Shuttle mission since STS-1 4th......Of 5 flights planned for 2002 86th.....Post-Challenger mission 26th.....Flight of Atlantis (Serial Number: OV-104) 49th.....Launch off pad 39B 25th.....51.6 degree inclination 49th.....Launch off pad 39B 84th.....Day launch 37th.....Day launch off pad 39B 60th.....KSC landing 91st.....Day landing 46th.....Day landing at KSC After an on-time blast off Oct. 7, Ashby guided Atlantis to a smooth docking with the lab complex last Wednesday. The next day, station flight engineer Peggy Whitson, operating the station's Canadarm2 space crane, pulled a 14.5-ton solar array truss segment from Atlantis' cargo bay and attached it to a truss section, known as S0, already in place atop the U.S. Destiny laboratory module. Wolf and Sellers then staged three successful spacewalks to outfit and activate the new S1 truss segment. The station's solar array truss ultimately will stretch 365 feet and consist of 11 segments, five extending to either side of the central S0 truss. Huge solar array panels will be mounted at each end of the completed beam to provide the electrical power needed by the lab's life support systems and science equipment. To carry away the heat generated by those systems, ammonia coolant will flow through massive radiators on two inboard truss segments, the newly installed S1 and the nearly identical P1 segment, which is scheduled for attachment during NASA's next assembly mission next month. During their three spacewalks, Wolf and Sellers hooked up ammonia lines between S1 and the S0 truss atop the Destiny module and connected power and data cables. They also installed special clamps to eliminate possible ammonia leakage in more than 30 quick-disconnect fittings. Between spacewalks, the combined crews transferred some 1,800 pounds of supplies and equipment from Atlantis to the station, along with more than 1,300 pounds of fresh water. NASA's next space station assembly mission is scheduled for launch Nov. 10, three days after the Soyuz taxi crew returns to Earth aboard the station's current lifeboat. The station's current crew - Expedition 5 commander Valery Korzun, flight engineer Sergei Treschev and science officer Whitson - are scheduled to return to Earth aboard Endeavour after 167 days in space. They will be replaced by Expedition 6 commander Kenneth Bowersox, Donald Pettit and cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin. The Expedition 6 crew, along with their shuttle crewmates, strapped in aboard Endeavour earlier today for a traditional practice countdown. Ham said Endeavour will be ready to go Nov. 10, but if launch of the new Soyuz ultimately is delayed, launch of Endeavour could be delayed as well. 01:00 p.m., 10/18/02, Update: Next Soyuz launch expected to slip Launch of a new Russian Soyuz lifeboat to the international space station, currently scheduled for Oct. 28, is expected to slip one or more days because of unrelated technical issues, officials said today. A planned reboost maneuver earlier today to raise the station's altitude and to synchronize its orbit with the planned trajectory of the Soyuz fell 4.47 mph short of expectations. This is a minor issue, but it means the station's orbit is not quite in synch with the requirements of the Soyuz rendezvous. At the same time, Russian engineers are investigating the failure of an unmanned Soyuz-U rocket that exploded shortly after takeoff earlier this week. A Novosti correspondent today reported the Soyuz taxi flight has been delayed "several days" because of the ongoing failure investigation. An earlier press release from the Russian Space Agency said the launch would not be affected. NASA hopes to learn more from the Russians early next week. In the meantime, agency sources say the Soyuz launch will, in fact, slip a few days. Launch of the shuttle Endeavour on the next space station mission is targeted for Nov. 10. But Endeavour will not be cleared for launch until the Soyuz taxi crew undocks and lands in the station's current lifeboat. Depending on when the new Soyuz actually launches, Endeavour's flight could slip a day or so as well. 01:20 p.m., 10/18/02, Update: Astronauts pleased with mission Looking fit and in good spirits, the Atlantis astronauts thanked ground workers during a quick walk-around inspection of their shuttle before heading to crew quarters and reunions with friends and family members. "It's great to be back in Florida," commander Jeffrey Ashby said from the runway. "What an incredible adventure we've been on. As I stand here, I can't help but think of all the people who helped us take the S1 (solar array) truss up there. It's been an amazing team effort, it's taken a couple of years and it culminated when we installed S1 a few days ago on the international space station. "I can tell you the space station is alive and well," Ashby continued. "Peggy (Whitson) and Valery (Korzun) and Sergei (Treschev) are doing great, they're doing a lot of research and science aboard and we have great hopes for the future and what they'll produce. Thank you very much." While Atlantis' crew was gearing up for re-entry and landing this morning, the crew of the shuttle Endeavour, scheduled for launch around Nov. 10, strapped in at pad 39A and worked through a dress-rehearsal countdown. Endeavour's crew will meet with reporters later today for a brief question-and-answer session. ===================================================================