Endeavour Space Shuttle Prepares to Launch
This coming Monday, February 18, 2007, the space shuttle Endeavour will roll onto Launch Pad 39A at the famous NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Following on the footsteps of the Discovery and Atlantis to prepare the scientific laboratory on the International Space Station, it looks as if the next laboratory will launch on March 11th for a 16-day mission. At least that is the tentative plan. Nothing is definite for the STS-123 and STS-124 missions until the successful return of the Atlantis, after which the next two shuttle flights will be assessed and coordinated with NASA’s international partners.
With the initial steps of the Endeavour’s launching beginning at 7 a.m. EST, at this time the fully assembled space shuttle will be loaded on the mobile launcher platform, complete with the orbiter, external tank, and twin solid rocket boosters. Driving for six hours, about 1 mph on a 3.4 mile journey, the precious load will be delivered to the pad on top of a crawler transporter.
The first section of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s “Kibo Laboratory” and the Canadian Space Agency’s two-armed bandit, Dextre, will be the transported cargo aboard the Endeavour.
Five spacewalks will be required to put this whole thing together once it arrives, joining the recently delivered Columbus laboratory which will be fully attached to the Harmony module. Returning home on the Endeavour after the delivery will be Flight Engineer Leopold Eyharts of the European Space Agency, with Garrett Reisman remaining as a resident crewmember.
The crew of STS-123 realize their flight is a momentous one–a flight that unites all the international partners together for the International Space Station’s laboratory. Each country is actively participating in the ISS’s laboratory in the name of science, with this module from Japan just a beginning for this country. Considered the smaller of the two Japanese modules, it contains critical avionics and also serves as storage for experiment materials. Kibo’s main facility, along with its special robotic arm, is scheduled to launch the next launch after the Endeavour. After this, astronauts will be able to expose experiments directly to space.
The first section of the Japanese module will be installed on the upper side of the Harmony node, with JAXA astronaut Mission Specialist Takao Doi looking forward to an exciting and rewarding accomplishment his country has been looking forward to for a very long time. On the first spacewalk, Linnehan and Reisman will be the ones going outside to prepare the module for installation, with Doi installing the module from inside using the shuttle’s robotic arm.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
