HOUSTON — NASA's space shuttle Endeavour
ended a high-speed chase of the International Space Station (ISS) late
Wednesday, poising the orbiter's seven-astronaut crew to kick off two busy
weeks of construction in space.
Veteran
spaceflyer Dominic Gorie, commander of the STS-123 shuttle
mission crew, backed Endeavour into docking position at about 11:49 p.m.
EDT (0349 GMT March 13), just as the sun crept over the Earth and illuminated
it into a bright blue ball.
"Endeavour
arriving," said space station commander Peggy Whitson, ringing a
ceremonial bell inside the ISS to signal the shuttle crew's arrival.
"Peggy,
that's sweetest bell I've ever heard," Gorie said in response as the two
spacecraft flew in tandem 213 miles (343 kilometers) over Singapore.
NASA pushed
back the shuttle's expected arrival time by 24 minutes, but Gorie successfully eased
it onto the station's U.S. Harmony node.
"Dom did
a perfect job," said Mike Moses, lead shuttle flight director, of Gorie's
piloting job. "He had it right on the money."
Orbital
acrobatics
Prior to
docking the space shuttle, the veteran commander guided the 100-ton orbiter
into an orbital back flip at 10:26 p.m. EDT (0226 GMT March 13) — a
now-standard procedure used to expose the orbiter's heat-resistant belly to
space station photographers.
Whitson and
flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko each shot hundreds of photos of the black
tiling covering Endeavour's underside. Shortly after the maneuver, Whitson made
quick work of beaming the digital images down to Johnson Space Center (JSC).
"It
looks just spectacular," said Terry Virts, spacecraft communicator, of
Whitson's photographic work.
LeRoy Cain,
chair of NASA's mission management team, said engineers will pore over the
images to look for any signs of damage to Endeavour's heat shield.
New
cargo, crewmember
Shortly
after the two crews with hugs and cheers, shuttle robotic arm operators began
on-orbit construction by transferring a pallet holding Canada's two-armed robot
named Dextre from the shuttle's payload bay to a space station.
Astronauts
will spend most of their upcoming mission day building the 1.72-ton robot as
well as installing the Japanese Logistics Pressurized (JLP) module — the first
of three pieces of Japan's school bus-sized Kibo laboratory.
Mission specialists Rick Linnehan and
Garrett Reisman will perform the 6.5-hour choreographed excursion outside of
the space station. Reisman, who traded places with European astronaut
Leopold Eyharts Thursday morning as a member of the Expedition 16 space
station crew, said he can't wait for the spacewalking activities.
"The
spacewalk is going to be, I think, the highlight for my entire time up
there," Reisman said in a preflight NASA interview. "I don't think
anything that I'll do will be able to compare to going outside in a spacesuit
and floating free of the station."
So far,
so good
Speaking to
reporters in an early morning press conference here at JSC, Moses said a
preliminary look at data from a scan of Endeavour's heat shield with a
sensor-tipped boom showed nothing of major concern so far.
"Everything
looked really good," Moses said, noting that Endeavour's crew can perform
a second and more detailed inspection if needed. "They don't suspect that
we're going to have any focused inspection requirements."
Space
shuttle Endeavour launched from Kennedy Space Center at 2:28:14 a.m. EDT
(0648:14 GMT) on March 11, and mission managers expect the spacecraft to return
to Earth the evening of March 26. At 16 planned mission days, the mission is
the longest ISS-bound ever attempted by NASA.
NASA is broadcasting
Endeavour's STS-123 mission live on NASA TV. Click here for SPACE.com's
shuttle mission coverage and NASA TV feed.
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