This
story was updated at 8:32 p.m. EDT.
HOUSTON -
The International Space Station's (ISS) giant Japanese laboratory got a second
room Friday after astronauts attached its attic-like storage room.
Wielding
the space station's robotic arm, astronauts plucked the small storage room from
a temporary berth and stuck it atop
its permanent home on the roof of Japan's new tour bus-sized Kibo
laboratory.
"Good job,"
said Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide after his crewmate, NASA astronaut
Karen Nyberg, eased the storage room into place at about 3:58 p.m. EDT (1958
GMT). Hoshide and station flight engineer Greg Chamitoff locked the spare
Kibo room in place a few minutes later.
The storage
room, known as the Japanese Logistics Module, is a squat cylinder about 14.4
feet (4.4 meters) wide designed to hold spare parts, experiments and other
equipment for Japan's $1 billion main Kibo lab. It arrived last March to await
its parent module.
Discovery
shuttle astronauts delivered the 37-foot (11 meter) Kibo laboratory earlier
this week, then bounced off its curved walls in an ad
hoc opening ceremony before filling it with phone booth-sized equipment
racks.
"It's
awesome to enter a completely new module," station commander Sergei Volkov told
reporters Friday during a series of televised interviews. "It's very
impressive."
While it
may not that new car smell, Discovery's commander Mark Kelly - who has called
the Kibo laboratory the "Lexus
of station modules" - said Friday that giant room does have a "new car
feel."
"It's
incredibly big," Kelly said in the interviews. "A lot of room, you have to be
extra careful. You can get out in the middle and you can't reach a handrail,
and you can get kind of stuck there for a while."
Japan's
Kibo lab is the third new room for the space station this year and the third research
laboratory to be installed at the orbiting outpost. The European Columbus
laboratory arrived in February to join NASA's U.S. Destiny laboratory already
aboard the station.
Russia's
Zarya control and Zvezda service modules, and two airlocks, round out the
station's main rooms, which are connected by berthing points or smaller
connecting nodes.
But the
32,000-pound (14,514-kg) Kibo lab is the largest of the station's orbital rooms
and is still incomplete. A porch-like exterior platform is slated to launch
aboard a NASA space shuttle next year to be attached to the end of the module,
which sports two windows, a small airlock and a robotic arm to manipulate
external experiments. A smaller arm will also arrive with the new platform.
Astronauts
also planned to power up Kibo's main 33-foot (10-meter) robotic arm today to
prepare for its first checkouts tomorrow. A spacewalk, the third of Discovery's
STS-124 mission, is on tap for Sunday to replace an empty nitrogen tank for
the station's cooling system.
Once that
last spacewalk is complete, the astronauts are expected to reopen Kibo's attic
storage space for good on Monday, mission managers said.
"We're
going to make some pretty interesting scientific discoveries," Kelly said of
the Kibo lab, adding that with a larger space comes more room for science.
"It's a big deal not only for Japan, the United States and Russia and the
European partners and Canadians, but I think it's a big deal for everybody on
the planet."
NASA is broadcasting Discovery's STS-124 mission live on
NASA TV on Saturday. Click here
for SPACE.com's shuttle mission updates and NASA TV feed.
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