This story was updated at 12:01 p.m. EDT.
HOUSTON - For three astronauts aboard the International Space
Station (ISS), the busy season does not end with the successful
departure of six astronauts aboard NASA's shuttle Atlantis today.
Just hours after Atlantis undocked
from the ISS at 8:50 a.m. EDT (1250 GMT) today, Expedition
13 commander Pavel Vinogradov and flight
engineers Jeffrey
Williams and Thomas
Reiter are already looking forward to the arrival of their next human
visitors and the departure of a faithful robotic cargo ship over the next four
days.
"This is a unique situation," NASA's
deputy ISS program manager Kirk Shireman said of the
confluence of spacecraft visiting the Expedition 13 crew. "They are going to be
working extremely hard until the time they come home...it's going to be busy."
A Russian-built Soyuz TMA-9
spacecraft is slated
to launch the next ISS crew - Expedition
14 commander Michael
Lopez-Alegria and flight engineer Mihkail Tyurin - at 12:09
a.m. EDT (0409 GMT) Monday with U.S. entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari, a paying ISS
visitor, aboard.
"It's a tricky choreography," said Daria Lopez-Alegria, wife of
Expedition 14 commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, in a
NASA interview at Baikonur Cosmodrome
in the Central Asian steppes of Kazakhstan, where her husband is set to launch.
"It's unbelievable that we can manage the schedule like that."
About eight hours later, the
Expedition 13 crew will jettison the unmanned Russian cargo ship Progress
21 from its berth at the end of the space station's Zvezda
service module so the incoming Soyuz will have a docking port when it arrives
on Sept. 20 - the same day Atlantis is slated to land at NASA's Kennedy Space
Center in Florida.
Paul Dye, NASA's lead shuttle flight
director for Atlantis' STS-115 mission, said the shuttle and ISS crews got a
small break when image analysts determined that a second look at the orbiter's
heat shield - known as a focused inspection - would not be necessary. The
decision allowed the orbiter to undock Sunday, rather than Monday.
"If we had stayed an extra day, we
had a traffic management plan that would have taken a spirograph
to show you," Dye said Saturday.
The Atlantis STS-115 crew, commanded
by veteran
shuttle astronaut Brent Jett, spent about six days of their planned 11-day
mission docked at the ISS to deliver a $372
million pair of 17.5-ton trusses and new power-generating solar wings to
the orbital laboratory.
"This is probably as busy as it's
ever been aboard the International Space Station," NASA astronaut Michael Fincke, who served a six-month tour aboard the ISS
during 2004's
Expedition 9, told SPACE.com.
Altogether three spacecraft will be
flying either to or away from the ISS within four days of one another.
"Pavel and
I will be busy until we're resting on the steppes of Kazakhstan, I guess," Williams said
just after Atlantis launched
toward the ISS on Sept. 9.
Vinogradov and Williams will return to Earth
on Sept. 28 with Ansari after an eight-day crew
change with the Expedition 14 crew. Reiter, who joined Expedition 13 during a
July shuttle visit by NASA's
STS-121 astronauts aboard the Discovery orbiter, will stay on as an
Expedition 14 flight engineer until his relief arrives in December.
"We haven't had to do anything
unreasonable," NASA's ISS program manager Michael Sufferdini
said of the scheduling for Vinogradov and Williams,
who unlike Reiter must pack their bags to return to Earth on top of all their
other duties. "You have to remember, when [Atlantis's crew] leaves, immediately
the Soyuz is coming up, and that represents a ride home for those guys."
Williams has spent about an extra
hour working each day, shuttle officials said.
Shireman said the last shuttle flight to the
ISS that overlapped with an arriving Soyuz occurred during NASA's STS-100
mission in 2001, but some top NASA officials believe handling multiple
spacecraft like Soyuz, Progress, shuttle
and the ISS will
become more common in the future.
"I think it is pretty indicative of
what we are going to have in the future here," William Gerstenmaier,
NASA's associate administrator for space operations, said last week. "So, at some
time, we will have the Progress free-flying, we will have the Shuttle
free-flying, and we will have the Soyuz free-flying, as well as the station. So
there is going to be a lot of spacecraft in orbit around there to keep track
of."
Gaining experience in such
spacecraft traffic control, Gerstenmaier said, will
be vital for future exploration.
"When we are
going to go pick
up the lunar activity and then eventually some of the Mars stuff, these
kind of skills of learning to operate multiple vehicles, again, in space and do
rendezvous and [proximity operations], they are going to be critical for those
activities," he added.
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