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Shuttle Heads for Rendezvous With Space Station
Topic Started: Feb 13 2009, 06:51 AM (45 Views)
Warren
Administrator
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Shuttle Heads for Rendezvous With Space Station

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The shuttle Discovery blasted its way into orbit through wispy clouds against blue skies on its way to deliver a bus-sized laboratory to the International Space Station.

The column of smoke, bright white against the brilliant day, cast a shadow to the east as the shuttle ascended, and the sound waves from more than 7 million pounds of thrust made the air itself seem to shudder.

The shuttle, with its crew of seven astronauts, roared off of the pad at 5:02 p.m., the beginning of a five-minute window for launching that would line it up with the orbit of the International Space Station. Discovery is expected to catch up to the station and dock with it on Monday.

In a business where delays are standard operating procedure, both the weather and the technical gremlins that often bedevil launching attempts caused no problems.

“It’s a gorgeous day to launch,” said Michael Leinbach, giving approval for Discovery’s ride shortly.

The shuttle commander, Cmdr. Mark Kelly, replied, “Stand by for the greatest show on Earth.”

The $1 billion “Kibo” module is the largest part of three shuttle payloads that will bring the full Kibo assembly up to the station. It will be the largest “room” on the station, and will eventually include an exposed area, like a back porch, where some experiments will be exposed to the harsh vacuum and temperature extremes of space.

Initial imagery from the ascending craft showed what appeared to be insulating foam falling off the external tank some three minutes into the launching, but it was unclear whether the foam caused any damage to the orbiter. Three minutes, however, is well past the time that NASA believes falling foam can cause critical damage to the craft.

The commander for the mission, the 123rd in the history of the shuttle program, is Commander Kelly of the Navy, and the pilot is Cmdr. Kenneth T. Ham, also of the Navy. Commander Kelly is making his third trip to space; only one other member of the crew, Michael E. Fossum, a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, has been to space. He will be on his second mission.

The other crew members are Karen Nyberg, Col. Ron Garan of the Air Force and Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The seventh member of the crew, Gregory Chamitoff, will be staying aboard the station to begin a six-month rotation there, and will replace Garrett E. Reisman, who has been aboard the station since March.

Among the spectators for the event was Gabrielle Giffords, who is married to Commander Kelly and is a Democratic member of Congress from Arizona, along with the family members of all of the crew.

Also in attendance were the Secretary of Agriculture, Ed Schafer; the governor of Oklahoma; Steve Wozniak, the cofounder of Apple Computer; several members of Congress; and 16 members of the shuttle class of 1978, the first group of astronauts chosen specifically for the shuttle program. That group brought diversity to the astronaut corps: the first women and racial minorities, including Sally Ride and known within NASA as the “Thirty-Five New Guys,” holding a 30th anniversary reunion of their induction into the space program.

The Discovery astronauts will be bringing a last-minute addition to their cargo: they are carrying replacement parts for a broken toilet aboard the station. The toilet has separate systems for dealing with solid and liquid waste, and only the system for capturing and storing urine is malfunctioning. The unit that directs urine flow and separates the liquid from air for storage, stopped working last week, and two replacement units that were on board the station have also failed.

The new unit being carried to the station by Discovery comes from a different batch of the machines, and engineers hope that this time the repair will hold. In the meantime, the astronauts aboard the station are working around the problem with a receptacle that bypasses the separation system. But it is a complicated workaround that is time consuming and requires the astronauts to waste a great deal of water in the process..

The mission includes three spacewalks to help install Kibo, perform station maintenance and to test techniques for cleaning a malfunctioning rotary joint that is a critical part of the station’s power supply.

That joint, 10 feet in diameter, rotates one of the station’s sets of enormous solar arrays so that they face the Sun during each orbit. NASA idled the joint last year, when it was found to be damaged by metal shavings that fouled its inner workings and were being ground in by the operation of the joint.

Several spacewalks in the past year have been devoted to examining the damage, but the cause of the problem and the precise part that was being ground away by the rotating joint are still unclear. The station has the power it needs now even with a stationary joint, but the station will not be able to reach its full functional capacity without the energy boost from a working joint.

Colonel Fossum, the lead spacewalker for the mission, will be testing the cleanup techniques during a space walk that — as he put it in a press briefing before the mission — involves “the kind of tools you’d have in your garage.” He will use a putty knife to smooth the surface of the “race ring,” the part that has been most damaged by the errant particles, and grease and cloths to see what works best.

Later crews will try to correct the problem that caused the shavings by either replacing parts, or, if the source of the trouble cannot be tracked down or corrected, to switch to the use of a second, backup ring that is already part of the joint assembly.

But for now, the problem with the Russian-made toilet has grabbed the most attention for the flight. And the troubles with the urine and storage could cause larger problems for the station and its crew if the new unit fails to fix the problem. The next shipment of supplies will not arrive until September.

Julie Payette, a Canadian astronaut, said that despite all of the jokes: “We actually take this extremely seriously. In our book, the hygiene cabinet — the toilet — is perhaps one of the most important systems on any spacecraft.” It should go without saying, she said, that “we’re humans. We generate waste — we need a way to dispose of it.” After all, she said, “we can’t change nature.”

But she expressed confidence that the Russians would be able to get the system working again, because Russian engineering tends to be robust and repairable. “hey have really good engineers,” she said.
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