It's crunch
time for three astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as they prime
their orbital laboratory for the planned December arrival of a new
European-built module.
Commanded
by veteran NASA
spaceflyer Peggy Whitson, the station's Expedition 16 crew is trading its Thanksgiving
holiday this month for a busy to-do list that includes no less than three
spacewalks - the first of which begins Friday - and two critical moves of ISS
hardware.
The
spacewalks and hardware relocations must go smoothly, and NASA must find a way
to trim about five days' worth of work from the Expedition 16 crew's schedule,
if the shuttle Atlantis is to launch toward the ISS on Dec. 6 with the European
Space Agency's (ESA) Columbus
laboratory.
"Basically,
we're taking our plan a couple weeks at a time now," Holly Ridings, NASA's
lead ISS flight director for Expedition 16, told reporters Tuesday. "Our focus
is to keep the [shuttle] launch in December and it'd be great if we can make
the beginning of that window."
Looming
launch
NASA has a
slim window that runs from Dec. 6 to Dec. 13 in which to launch
Atlantis to the ISS while the station's solar arrays and the Sun are in the
optimum position to provide power during docked operations. If the shuttle
misses the December window, it would launch no earlier than Jan. 2, mission managers
have said.
Commanded
by veteran shuttle flyer Stephen Frick, Atlantis' STS-122 astronaut crew will attach
ESA's Columbus laboratory to the starboard side of Harmony, which serves as the
central hub for European and Japanese modules at the ISS.
But before
Frick and his six STS-122 crewmates can launch spaceward, Whitson and her own crew
must move Harmony to its permanent spot outside the ISS.
Astronauts
delivered the Italian-built Harmony node to the space station last week during NASA's
STS-120 shuttle mission aboard Discovery, but the bus-sized compartment was
attached to a temporary berth on the outpost's Unity module. Discovery's
STS-120 crew, meanwhile, is set to
land on Wednesday.
Busy
November
On Friday,
Whitson and Malenchenko will step outside the ISS to prime a shuttle docking
port for its move from the tip of the station's U.S. Destiny laboratory to the
end of Harmony.
Tani will use
the station's robotic arm to move the docking port move early Monday, then relocate
the entire Harmony-docking port structure back to the front of Destiny on
Wednesday. A pair of spacewalks, on Nov. 20 and 24, respectively, will fold
Harmony and its docking port back into the ISS power and data grid.
Only then,
Ridings said, will the Expedition 16 crew be ready to open Harmony and its
shuttle docking port - known as Pressurized Mating Adapter-2 - for business as
early as Nov. 26. Once Harmony is reopened, the station crew has about 15 days
of work to perform, but only 10 days until the earliest opportunity for
Atlantis to launch.
"The folks on the ground are very good about scheduling things out and making sure that we're not too overloaded," said NASA astronaut Clayton Anderon, a former Expedition 16 crewmember returning to Earth aboard Discovery. "I don't think it's going to be any trouble for them. They're going to knock it out and do great things."
Mission
managers are now looking at which tasks can be culled from the Expedition 16
crew's schedule to allow the earliest launch attempt possible while still
allowing the station astronauts adequate time for rest and relaxation.
"We
need to give the crew an adequate rest time, we can't just run them seven days
a week," said NASA's ISS Expedition 16 increment manager Pete Hasbrook.
"And if that means going into the December window a little bit, we'll do
that."
Even before
launching to the ISS, Whitson and her crew decided to forego taking the
traditional U.S. Thanksgiving holiday off on Nov. 22 if it would help ease
their packed station construction schedule, Ridings added.
"Even
preflight, the crew knew that this month of November was going to be very
busy," Ridings said, adding that flight controllers will also be hard at
work. "We'll have turkey in the control center and have a lot of fun, so
we're looking forward to it."
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