Seven astronauts are getting up close and
personal with NASA's shuttle
Discovery this week as engineers ready the space plane's boosters and fuel
tank for flight.
Discovery's
STS-116 astronauts, commanded by shuttle flight veteran Mark Polansky, are at
NASA's Florida-based Kennedy Space Center (KSC) spaceport poring over their
orbiter, its cargo and the tools they will use during a planned December mission
to rewire the power
grid aboard the International
Space Station (ISS).
Jessica
Rye, a NASA spokesperson at KSC, said
the astronauts were set to examine Discovery's heat shield, payload bay, crew
cabin and windows during a multi-day Crew Equipment Interface Test (CEIT).
The
astronauts are set to launch no earlier than Dec. 7 at 9:38 p.m. EST (0238 Dec.
8 GMT) to haul a Spacehab module and the new Port 5 section of the space station's main truss to the orbital laboratory, where they will stage three spacewalks to wire two recently
installed solar arrays into the ISS power grid.
While
Polansky and his STS-116 crew looked over Discovery in the shuttle's Orbiter
Processing Facility, engineers in NASA's massive Vehicle Assembly
Building connected the spacecraft's 15-story external tank to the two solid
rocket boosters that will help launch the astronauts spaceward.
"We mated
the external tank and boosters early this morning," NASA spokesperson Bruce
Buckingham told SPACE.com.
Polansky, STS-116
pilot William Oefelein and mission specialists Joan Higginbotham, Nicholas
Patrick, Robert Curbeam, Christer Fugelsang - of the European Space Agency - and
ISS flight engineer Sunita
Williams arrived at KSC over Wednesday and Thursday. Their CEIT training
session ends on Saturday.
NASA's STS-116 mission will mark the
agency's third shuttle flight in 2006 and the second this year dedicated to ISS
construction. The previous mission - STS-115
aboard Atlantis - delivered two massive
trusses and a pair
of new solar wings to the orbital laboratory in September.
NASA plans
about 14 more shuttle missions to complete
the ISS by September 2010, when the space agency is expected to retire its
three-orbiter fleet to make way for the capsule-based Orion program.
advertisement
