This
story was updated at 8:47 a.m. EDT.
HOUSTON —
The seven astronauts of NASA's shuttle Discovery will say farewell to the
International Space Station (ISS) crew Tuesday as they prepare to head home
after adding a massive Japanese laboratory to the orbiting outpost.
Shuttle
commander Mark Kelly and his crew will shut the hatches between Discovery and
the station at about 3:57 p.m. EDT (1957 GMT) after nine days of construction
work to deliver Japan's billion-dollar Kibo laboratory.
"The
Japanese laboratory is big, capable, pretty much ready to go," Kelly said from
orbit Monday. "It's in good shape."
The shuttle
crew will take a few hours off today before shutting the hatches between
the station and their spacecraft. Discovery is set to undock from the space
station Wednesday at 7:42 a.m. EDT (1142 GMT).
Discovery
astronauts delivered Japan's tour bus-sized Kibo laboratory and attached its rooftop
storage attic last week. The astronauts performed three spacewalks to prime
the new lab and its 33-foot (10-meter) robotic arm for orbital work.
"It's
simply spectacular to see the Kibo robotic arm partly deployed," said Tetsuro Yokoyama,
deputy Kibo operations project manager for the Japan Aerospace Exploration
Agency, which built the new 37-foot (11-meter) lab.
The nearly
16-ton Kibo lab's arrival boosted the station's mass to more than 600,000
pounds (277,598 kg), leaving it about 71 percent complete, NASA officials have
said. A smaller robotic arm and porch-like external experiment platform are
expected to complete
the Kibo lab when they launch next year, but JAXA officials are hoping to
begin the first science experiments as early as August, Yokoyama said.
"Of course,
the opportunity to do science research grew incredibly now that we have an
additional science module," said station commander Sergei Volkov of Russia. "It's great,
and we are looking forward to doing this."
In addition
to the Kibo module, Discovery also ferried NASA astronaut Gregory Chamitoff to
the space station. He replaced fellow U.S. spaceflyer Garrett Reisman, who has
lived aboard the station for the last three months.
"I can't
imagine what these past few months would have been like without the help you've
given me," Reisman told mission controllers here in
Houston, as well as at all the station's centers in the U.S., Canada, Russia,
Europe and Japan.
Reisman joined the station's Expedition 16 crew in March and stayed aboard in April when his Expedition 17 crewmates, Volkov and cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, arrived.
"Garrett, best wishes to you as you spend the last day of your mission on the space station," Mission Control radioed up Reisman during his last morning briefing. "Thanks for all your hard work over the last several months, we all look forward to your return."
Chamitoff
is settling in for a six-month stay aboard the station as part of its three-man
crew, while Reisman will return to Earth aboard Discovery.
"When they
leave, I think it's going to be very sad for me to see them go," Chamitoff said
Monday. "I think that one moment, when we close the hatch, that's going to be
the hard moment."
Discovery
and its
astronaut crew are scheduled to land at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in
Florida on Saturday.
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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