This
story was updated at 11:45 a.m. EDT.
HOUSTON -
After busy week of spacewalks and orbital construction, the six-astronaut crew
of NASA's shuttle Atlantis
relaxed a bit Saturday at the International Space
Station (ISS).
Atlantis' STS-115
crew, commanded by veteran
shuttle flyer Brent Jett, took a few hours off Saturday morning before
speaking with reporters on Earth and hauling cargo between their Atlantis
spacecraft and the ISS.
"We hope
you enjoy the couple of free hours you have and enjoy your day," European Space
Agency astronaut Hans Schlegel, serving as spacecraft communicator, told
STS-115 mission specialist Daniel
Burbank as the crew awoke at 1:15 a.m. EDT (0515 GMT).
Mission
controllers roused the Atlantis crew with Jimmy Buffet's "Twelve Volt Man," a
song chosen for Burbank by his wife Ros and their children, Emily and Daniel.
"Thanks
very much for that great wake up music," Burbank told mission control. "It's a
great day up here in space and I really appreciate that. Thanks Houston."
Atlantis'
six astronauts have a brief respite of sorts from the intense schedule they
followed to deliver the new, $372 million Port
3/Port 4 (P3/P4) truss segments and new solar arrays to the ISS. The
astronauts launched on Sept. 9 and are now on Flight Day 8 of their mission.
"They do
have off duty time," John McCullough, lead ISS flight director for Atlantis'
mission, told reporters Friday. "They're generally all winding down."
But today's
rest is a short break from the challenging days ahead, McCullough added.
STS-115
mission specialist Heidemarie
Stefanyshyn-Piper, for example, is in charge of ensuring that all vital
cargos to be transferred from Atlantis to the ISS reach their destinations. She
is also making sure the unneeded items aboard the orbital laboratory are packed
away in Atlantis' middeck.
As of
Friday, about 60 percent of that cargo transfer was complete, mission managers
said.
"We had half
a day off this morning, and it gave us the opportunity first of all to sleep in
because we've been very, very busy," Stefanyshyn-Piper said in a space-to-ground
link between the joint ISS-Atlantis crew and reporters.
Stefanyshyn-Piper
said ISS Expedition 13 flight engineer Jeffrey Williams, a NASA astronaut, also
gave the shuttle astronauts a tour of the station during their off-time.
"Jeff gave
us a real nice tour of the International Space Station, going into some of the
modules that we normally don't go into like the Soyuz capsule, which was very
interesting, and the rest of the time was spent taking pictures and getting an
opportunity to look out the window," she said.
Meanwhile,
other STS-115 astronauts such as Jett and pilot Chris
Ferguson are looking ahead to Sunday, when Atlantis is set to undock at
8:50 a.m. EDT (1250 GMT) from the ISS and circle the station in a maneuver
known as a flyaround. The STS-115 astronauts will leave the station's Expedition
13 commander Pavel
Vinogradov and flight engineers Jeffrey
Williams and Thomas
Reiter with much different ISS - with its new solar wings - than when they
arrived.
On Monday, Burbank his crewmates are expected to again survey
their shuttle's heat shield with a sensor laden inspection boom to seek out
any damage from micrometeorites or orbital debris.
"I think
basically they're getting a break...a little breather," McCullough said. "But
they also have some pretty good activities ahead of them."
Busy
flight
Atlantis'
STS-115 astronauts, with the aid of the three-astronaut ISS crew, have staged
three spacewalks in four days outside the orbital laboratory to wire up the
station's newest addition with power, data and fluid lines.
The
exhaustive schedule paused a day to allow the astronauts time to unfurl
new solar arrays on Thursday. A radiator for the solar arrays deployed
during the mission's final
extravehicular activity (EVA) on Friday.
"There are
some milestones that they had definitely been looking forward to, solar array
deploy, radiator deploy and knocking out all these EVAs successfully,"
McCullough said. "So they can take a breather [Saturday], get comfortable and
then jump back into it."
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