HOUSTON – Little more than five hours into the flight, Endeavour's crew will throw a switch to fire up the electric motors that start the 17-minute process to extend the 200-foot (60-meter) metal, plastic and carbon fiber radar mast that is at the heart of their mission. Once extended, the mast will be the longest rigid structure humans have ever flown in space.
Should any problems develop with the mast or the X-SAR antenna in the shuttle’s payload bay, the crew exhausts all their options from their troubleshooting checklist before attempting a spacewalk. But once the go-ahead is given from Mission Control and Commander Kevin Kregel, the crew will prepare the shuttle for a spacewalk likely to begin on the third day of the flight. The cabin pressure will be lowered and the spacesuits will be checked while a "Tiger Team" at Johnson Space Center (JSC) goes over the spacewalk plans and the problem at hand.
Then, crew members Janet Kavandi and Gerhard Thiele take center stage, and they are confident they can deploy the radar mast or perform several other tasks and repairs.
"In case it’s necessary to go out, I think we have a fair chance if one of these failures occurs," Thiele said. "Either we’ll extend the mast or retract it back."
Neither has performed an actual spacewalk and this is Thiele’s first trip into space, but Kavandi said the training has prepared them for their potential mission inside Endeavour’s payload bay.
"We trained in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, I think four times now, and each run has been between four and six hours," she said. "So we’ve been in the water quite a bit for this."
Kavandi also trained for a spacewalk when she flew aboard Discovery on a Mir docking mission in 1998.
Spacewalk training, particularly time in Johnson Space Center’s 40-foot deep pool, ranks high on Thiele’s favorite training tasks. "Going into the water tank is a lot of fun," he said. "I wish I could do it more often."
Some of the tasks the duo trained for include:
- Extending the mast
- Retracting the mast
- Rotating the mast antenna out for deployment or back in for landing
- Closing the latches on the mast canister once it’s retracted
- Repositioning the X-SAR antenna in the payload bay for data gathering or in preparation for landing
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