The Hindu : National : Shuttle set for an “exciting mission”

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Mar 10, 2008
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

National

National

Shuttle set for an “exciting mission”

John Schwartz

Endeavour to deliver human-looking robot

To also deliver first section of new Japanese laboratory
Includes dramatic night launching and five spacewalks

The shuttle Endeavour will light up the skies over Florida early Tuesday, kicking off a busy 16-day mission to the International Space Station.

If weather and the millions of parts that make up the shuttle cooperate, NASA will launch the shuttle from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.

The mission calls for astronauts to deliver the first section of a new Japanese laboratory known as Kibo to the station, as well as an eerily human-looking robot. That robot, a Canadian creation named Dextre, can sit on the end of the station’s robotic arm and perform some of the risky maintenance and service work that currently calls for a human touch.

“If you had to go to a drawing board and describe an exciting mission from scratch, I think you would come up with STS-123,” Dominic L. Gorie, the flight commander and a retired Navy captain, said at a news conference in Houston recently, using the mission’s official name.

The mission does, in fact, have a little of everything: a dramatic night launching, five spacewalks and station construction with the first Japanese module, which means that components from all of the station’s international partners — the United States, Russia, Canada, Europe and Japan — will finally be joined in orbit.

“For years we’ve been calling it an international space station,” Mr. Gorie said, “and now we’re truly there.”

The portion of the Kibo module that is riding with the Endeavour will be put in a temporary position on the station until the main laboratory is taken up this spring. Takao Doi, a Japanese astronaut on the flight, will take part in installing the pressurised room — not much longer than a Mini Cooper automobile — and will be the first to enter it.

Other spacewalks will involve assembling the nine large pieces of Dextre and inspecting a damaged rotary joint that is supposed to turn half of the station’s immense solar panels to face the sun. The joint has been out of commission since last year, and NASA has a team dedicated full time to figuring out how best to get it moving again.

Another spacewalk is devoted to a bit of unfinished business after the loss of the shuttle Columbia five years ago: testing an orbital goo gun that could be used to fix minor damage to shuttle tiles during a mission.

The other members of the crew are the pilot, Col. Gregory H. Johnson of the Air Force; Richard M. Linnehan; Capt. Michael J. Foreman of the Navy; Maj. Robert L. Behnken of the Air Force; and Garrett E. Reisman, an astronaut who will be staying aboard the station for long-term duty. He will take the place of Gen. Leopold Eyharts, a French astronaut who has lived aboard the station since last month.

Johnson, Foreman, Reisman and Behnken are rookies. This will be the fourth flight for Gorie and Linnehan, and the second for Doi.

A forecast issued on Friday at a space agency news briefing put the likelihood that weather conditions will allow launching at 90 per cent. To avoid scheduling conflicts with an Air Force satellite launching at Cape Canaveral, NASA will only attempt launchings on Tuesday and, if there is a delay, Wednesday before waiting until March 17.

Longest mission

At 16 days, this will be the longest mission devoted to station construction. It is also, however, part of the winding down of the shuttle program, which will have just a dozen missions more after this one to complete the station and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope before 2010.

This knowledge of an ending makes each mission somewhat bittersweet for those involved, Mr. Behnken said in an interview. “When I was a kid, I got to see the shuttle’s transit across the country” on the back of a 747, he said.

“It’s a little bit sad to see something that has been a part of your life” go into retirement, he said, “but it’s also kind of what needs to be done in order to move on.” — New York Times News Service

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National