The Space Shuttle Discovery has only just landed, and already NASA are prepping her sister ship--Atlantis--to launch in under a month. But there is a lot of work to do, both on the ground and up in space, before everything can go ahead. Here's a bit of a festive run down for you.
Presumably named for the mythological lost city of Atlantis, she's nearly 30 years old and has made almost as many missions. She's currently "mated" with her fuel tank and solid rocket boosters, and plans are to move her to NASA's Pad 39A launch site on the 10th of November.
But before Atlantis makes her slow and ponderous journey from the NASA's cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at the agency's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral, her payload must first make its appearance at 39A.
The European Space Agency's Columbus laboratory will most likely be moved to the launching pad this Wednesday, if all goes well. The new station module is to be joining European Space Agency astronaut Leopold Eyharts on Atlantis' last scheduled mission to the International Space Station.
That's right, with only two years until the Space Shuttle program is completed; this marks the first "last flight" to the International Space Station by one of the three shuttles currently in service.
STS-122 will be the 24th shuttle mission to the ISS, and the 121st space shuttle flight. It leaves only 10 flights, until the program is officially mothballed (not including two as-yet-unconfirmed Contingency Logistic Flights.)
The current version of the Expedition 16 crew consists of Peggy Whitson, Commander - NASA, Yuri Malenchenko, Flight Engineer--RSA and Daniel Tani, Flight Engineer 2--NASA who was only just delivered aboard Discovery. They have their work cut out for them over the next couple of weeks, as they have no less than 5 spacewalks to complete, and they must go smoothly.
Expedition 16 will be relocating the Shuttle docking to the "utility hub" Harmony, which will then itself be relocated further down the ISS, and back in to the ISS power grid. It'll be a busy couple of weeks, with spacewalks this Friday, a robotic arm movement on Monday, two more spacewalks on Nov. 20 and 24, and then 15 days of work to complete in 10 days, before Atlantis' first opportunity to launch.
"The folks on the ground are very good about scheduling things out and making sure that we're not too overloaded," said NASA astronaut Clayton Anderon, a former Expedition 16 crewmember returning to Earth aboard Discovery. "I don't think it's going to be any trouble for them. They're going to knock it out and do great things."
Harmony has to be ready on time prior to the launch, because the Columbus module which Atlantis is delivering, must be attached too Harmony.
Not all of you will necessarily be space fans, but the idea of all of this is really exciting to me. I'm definitely going to be calendaring a lot of this stuff so that I can watch it on the NASA TV.
Joshua Hill, a Geek’s-Geek from Melbourne, Australia, Josh is an aspiring author with dreams of publishing his epic fantasy, currently in the works, sometime in the next 5 years. A techie, nerd, sci-fi nut and bookworm.
