Astronauts
on the International Space Station will get back to work Sunday after a much
needed day off in order to retrieve a Japanese cargo carrier from the outpost's
brand new experiment porch.
Nicknamed
"Jelly" by the astronauts, the cargo carrier will be removed from the porch on
the edge of the station's $1
billion Kibo lab using the station's robotic arm and passed off to
Endeavour's own space crane so it can be secured for the trip home on Friday. It's
a tricky bit of robotics work, but one that is nearly the reverse of maneuvers
used to install the pallet last week.
"The good
thing on this mission is that a lot of the robotics activities, you put it back
the same way you got it out," said shuttle pilot Doug Hurley, who will help fly
the station's arm today, in a NASA interview. He and his crewmates took their first
day off in more than a week on Saturday to rest up from four grueling
spacewalks and tough robotic arm work at the station.
Endeavour
astronauts temporarily attached the Jelly carrier to Kibo's new porch so that its
three payloads - two science experiments and an advanced communications system
- could be transferred to the external
exposure facility. The pallet will be returned to Earth on Endeavour so
more experiments can be shipped up to the station later.
In addition
to their robotic arm work, the 13 Endeavour and station astronauts will discuss
their flight with reporters this afternoon during a joint crew conference.
Station commander Gennady Padalka of Russia and astronaut Koichi Wakata of
Japan also spoke with Japanese dignitaries and students early this morning.
Mission
Control told the astronauts today that they will not have to repair part of the
space station's American-built carbon dioxide removal system that cleans the
air inside the outpost. A heater glitch that tripped a circuit breaker sent the
system offline on Saturday, leaving only the station's Russian carbon dioxide
scrubber in its Russian-built segment available to clean the air of the crowded
space station.
Engineers
on Earth later managed to restart American system late Saturday from Mission
Control in Houston by using a built-in manual mode.
Endeavour's
crew is entering the homestretch of a tricky 16-day
construction flight to the station. The astronauts delivered a new
crewmember and the experiment porch during four challenging spacewalks. The
fifth and last spacewalk of the mission is set for Monday.
Endeavour
is due to leave the space station Tuesday and land July 31.
SPACE.com
is providing continuous coverage of STS-127 with reporter Clara Moskowitz and
senior editor Tariq Malik in New York. Click here for mission
updates and SPACE.com's live NASA TV video feed.
advertisement
