With Atlantis mission, shuttle's last days draw nearer
The latest launch, set for Friday, brings misty-eyed NASA engineers one step closer to the end of a flight program that's endured for 26 years.
from the June 8, 2007 edition
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Although this latest mission aims to increase the space station's ability to generate electricity, it also has a certain aesthetic element to it. "With this flight, we hope to see more symmetry" in the station's configuration, says Floyd Booker, the missions launch-package manager. After astronauts installed a similar set of solar panels last September, the orbiting outpost looked like an H with one leg missing. As a practical matter, this means the station's attitude-control system has to work harder to keep the outpost properly oriented.
Atlantis was originally scheduled to launch in March. But a severe thunderstorm moved across the launch site at the Kennedy Space Center, pelting it with golf-ball-size hail that damaged foam insulation at the top of the fuel tank. NASA had to haul the shuttle back into the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building to fix the foam.
"We're really excited to be at this point after a long and arduous spring," said Leroy Cain, launch-integration manager at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, at a prelaunch briefing Wednesday.
The delay prompted NASA to use this flight to exchange US space station crew members ahead of schedule: Sunita Williams – who has served as flight engineer aboard the station since December, setting a record for space walks by female astronauts and becoming the first astronaut to run the Boston Marathon in space (on a treadmill) – will return, to be replaced by Clayton Anderson.
After Friday's launch the Atlantis crew will spend two days circling Earth at ever greater distances to catch up with the station. Using an extension to the shuttle's robotic arm, they'll also inspect the craft for damage to the orbiter's heat-resistant tiles. Damage to Columbia's heat shield during launch led to the craft's destruction on reentry in 2003, killing its crew.
Once Atlantis docks to the station, astronauts using the orbiter's robotic arm will pluck a $376 million truss segment bearing the solar panels from the cargo bay and hand it off to the station's robotic arm. The station crew will use the arm to gingerly install the nearly 18-ton truss on an end of the station's girder-like backbone.
During the first of three planned space walks, mission specialists Jim Reilly and John "Danny" Olivas will hook up power cables from the truss and prepare the panels for deployment. The panels, which unfold like a gargantuan road map, will stretch 240 feet from tip to tip when fully extended. It will take two more space walks to prepare the new solar panel to rotate so that it can track the sun as the station orbits and to install an external vent valve for the new oxygen-generating system delivered last July.
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