Blast Off for Endeavour on March 11th
Considered to be one of the longest visits to the International Space Station, the upcoming Endeavour space mission will be a 16-day mission that possibly will extend into another day. Blasting off on March 11th, this flight is considered to be one of the longest and most complicated flights up to this point. It will have five spacewalks and major space stations from both Japan and Canada.
With the Atlantis returning on February 20th from the ISS, the second shuttle Endeavour has been prepared pretty quickly for its March launching in order to get going on the 2010 NASA deadline for the remaining shuttle flights. There are 12 remaining flights with 11 of them deliveries to the International Space Station and construction trips. The only issue that may develop, even though NASA does not feel it is a concern, is the 1-in-259 chance of the debris from the failed space satellite instead of the usual 1-in-269.
Representing one of the quickest “turn-arounds” for NASA in the past two-and-a-half years, especially since Columbia was destroyed upon its re-entry in 2003, a huge Japanese research complexes will be part of the new construction of the International Space Station.
This flight has one of the most experienced crews that have went up so far. The mission will spend around two weeks or so at the space station, in order to outfit Canada’s robot arm with a mechanical hand which will relieve a lot of stress and spacewalk detail. It will also install Japan’s Kibo laboratory complex, and in May, the primary portion of Kibo will be taken up, while its final segment will be taken up in 2009.
Simultaneously, Europe’s new cargo ship, the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) will be about 1.2 miles from the ISS during Endeavour’s flight, while waiting to berth. Also, the European Space Agency will be scheduling the debut of its unmanned spacecraft on March 7th at 11:28 pm, launching from Kourou, French Guiana.
Because of all the heat shield repairs required in NASA’s latest missions–even the one that killed seven of the NASA crew during the Columbia mission, included in the Endeavour mission will be a heat shield repair technique they want to demonstrate for making a service call to the Hubble Space Telescope in late August or early September this year.
The plan this year is to fly six shuttle missions this year–safely. This will include the Hubble flight to the Hubble Space Telescope. A total of 11 missions are planned before retiring the space shuttle program in 2010.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 5:42 am and is filed under Technical Concerns, The Gear to Get There. 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.
