Kategorie: Space Shuttle & ISS

On their fourth and final trip outside the International Space Station, US astronaut Robert Curbeam and Sweden’s Christer Fuglesang convinced a misbehaving solar panel to fold up nicely. The team suited up and began their spacewalk on Monday at 2:10 p.m. EST. With the solar panel safely folded away, the station’s new panels are free to rotate to face the Sun and generate the maximum amount of electricity.
Discovery undocks with the ISS at 5:10 p.m. EST Tuesday. The landing in Florida is scheduled for 3:36 p.m. EST Friday.
(Source: NASA)

STS-116 astronauts Robert Curbeam and Christer Fuglesang spent six and a half hours outside of the ISS Tuesday evening, attaching the P5 truss segment to the station. The spacewalkers also replaced a broken camera elsewhere on the truss and performed some get-ahead tasks for future spacewalks.
Source: NASA

Space shuttle Discovery successfully docked with the international space station Monday evening. Discovery’s crew plan to spend a week at the station, rewiring its electrical system and delivering a 2-ton addition.
An inspection of the exterior of the shuttle on Sunday turned up no evidence of damage to its tiles and panels sustained during its launch Saturday night.
Source: NASA

Space Shuttle Discovery and a crew of seven astronauts lifted off Saturday from Kennedy Space Center at 8:47 p.m. EST.
Shuttle @ NASA

Launch Photos @ KSC Media Archive

NASA moved the space shuttle Discovery to its launch pad on Thursday in preparation for its next mission in just under a month. Discovery arrived at launch pad 39B after 9 a.m. EDT on Thursday, a little less than nine hours after leaving the Vehicle Assembly Building. Discovery is scheduled to launch on mission STS-116, an ISS assembly flight, on the evening of December 7, 2006. The shuttle crew will deliver a third truss segment, a SPACEHAB module and other key components to the International Space Station.

Shuttle astronauts will make one final house call to the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a mission to extend and improve the observatory’s capabilities. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced plans for a fifth servicing mission to Hubble today during a meeting with agency employees at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The 11-day rehab mission, likely launching early May 2008 using space shuttle Discovery, would keep Hubble working until about 2013. Its batteries and gyroscopes, which are used to point the telescope, are degrading and they will now be replaced. The shuttle crew will also install two new instruments: the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). The new instruments will improve significantly Hubble’s ability to probe distant, faint objects in the early Universe. Griffin also announced the astronauts selected for the mission. Veteran astronaut Scott D. Altman will command the final space shuttle mission to Hubble. Navy Reserve Capt. Gregory C. Johnson will serve as pilot. Mission specialists include veteran spacewalkers John M. Grunsfeld and Michael J. Massimino and first-time space fliers Andrew J. Feustel, Michael T. Good and K. Megan McArthur. Altman will be making his fourth spaceflight and his second trip to Hubble. He commanded the STS-109 Hubble servicing mission in 2002. Grunsfeld, an astronomer, will be making his third trip to Hubble and his fifth spaceflight. He performed five spacewalks to service the telescope on STS-103 in 1999 and STS-109 in 2002. Massimino will be making his second trip to Hubble and his second spaceflight. He performed two spacewalks to service the telescope during the STS-109 mission in 2002.

NASA has drawn up its Constellation mission manifest, which sets out the dates and full mission baselines for the test flights, International Space Station (ISS) manned and unmanned missions, plus the first flights to the moon. The highlight of the manifest is Orion 13 – a 21 day mission, launching in December 2019 – which will see three members of a four man crew set foot on the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.

NASASpaceflight.com has obtained a copy of NASA’s current schedule for the Constellation program: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2006/10/nasa-sets-orion-13-for-moon-return/