HOUSTON - The six-astronaut crew of NASA's shuttle Atlantis had little time
to rest after reaching the International Space
Station (ISS) Monday, and immediately began delivering massive new pieces
of the orbital laboratory.
Atlantis' STS-115 astronauts boarded
the ISS by 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT), with mission specialists Daniel
Burbank and Steven
MacLean jumping into tasks to move a $372
million pair of trusses and solar arrays from the shuttle's cargo bay to
the end of the ISS robotic arm.
"This is an extremely busy day,"
Paul Dye, Atlantis' lead shuttle flight director, said during a status briefing
here at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "It's one of the busiest days I've
ever put together on paper for a mission, and they're handling it very well."
Typically, a shuttle docking is the
highlight of a day's work, but the Atlantis astronauts still had more on their
plate after joining Expedition
13 commander Pavel Vinogradov and flight
engineers Jeffrey
Williams and Thomas
Reiter aboard the ISS.
"This crew has been training longer
than any crew I've ever worked with and they're very flexible," Dye said of the
STS-115 astronauts' schedule.
Burbank and shuttle pilot Chris Ferguson
eased the 35,000-pound (15,875-kilogram) Port 3/Port 4 trusses out of Atlantis'
payload bay, at one time wrangling with clearances of just inches between the
station segments and orbiter hardware, shuttle officials said.
By 10:30 EDT (1430 GMT), the two joined truss
segments were parked at the end of the space station's nearly 57-foot
(17-meter) robotic arm under the direction of MacLean and Williams. MacLean, a
veteran shuttle flyer representing the Canadian Space Agency, is the first from
his country ever to control the space station's Canadian-built
robotic arm.
The robotic arm handoff has since
become a standard training exercise for astronauts, Dye said.
"We've done this P3/P4 unberth and handoff hundreds of times in simulations, over
and over and over," Dye told reporters while watching the orbital arm ballet on
NASA TV. "It's wonderful to see it happening for real."
With the P3/P4 truss segments now
hanging in space, the thermal clock is ticking to attach them to the end of the
Port 1 (P1) truss in a Tuesday
spacewalk, the first of three extravehicular activities (EVA) planned for
the STS-115 mission.
MacLean and Williams positioned the
new ISS hardware to keep it warm overnight, but the segments must be connected
to vital power and heaters - to be attached in tomorrow's 6.5-hour spacewalk -
before it can double the station's power grid capability.
The trusses will be connected to the
end of P1 via four motorized bolts before STS-115 spacewalkers Joseph
Tanner and Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper
step outside the ISS to attach the vital cables. Only three bolts are required
for a good connection, and the astronauts can manually drive the bolts in as
well - which would add at least 45 minutes to the spacewalk schedule - should
the automatic system fail, Dye said.
"We want to get the umbilicals hooked up on the EVA tomorrow in order to make
sure that we can keep that thing alive and in good shape," Dye said of
Tuesday's planned spacewalk. "We've got margin to that, of course, it won't be
a disaster if we don't make it there. But it is going to be a very aggressive
day."
NASA's STS-115
mission is the agency's first dedicated ISS construction flight since late
2002. Orbital construction stalled pending NASA's recovery from the 2003 Columbia accident. The
11-day mission will deliver the second of four planned U.S.-built solar arrays
to the station.
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