Coming of the new ISS laboratories
“Install Harmony should be straight forward”, said Lead Station Flight Director, Derek Hassman, while Lead Shuttle Flight Director, Rick LaBrode says, “It’s a kind of a shell game. We’re going to put it on the left side of Node 1, and then, after the mission undocks, we’ll robotically remove the part of the shuttle docks from the end of the lab and put it on Node 2. And then we’re going to take the Node 2 and put it on the end of the lab.” (http://www.nasa.gov)
Regardless, the opening of the gateway will require some shuffling before it is ready for the upcoming missions, which will bring the Japanese and European laboratories to the International Space Station. The shuttle has been docked to the International Space Station’s existing adapter port where the Node 2 is going to be attached to, so meanwhile the planning is scheduled for the Harmony to be installed in a temporary location. This position is on the first connecting node, Unity, until the Discovery mission is over and the crews return to Earth.
The station crewmembers of ISS will then move Harmony to its designated location to prepare for the upcoming missions. Once the modules are established, the labs will require electricity, so Pamela Melroy’s crew will have this as part of their job to set up the station’s exterior support truss and its power system. The truss segment that holds the station’s first set of solar arrays will be moved to a permanent location after Harmony is finally installed. The port 6 or P6 arrays have been attached to the middle of the truss for the past seven years and positioned vertically to the rest of the station while acting as a temporary system only. Now that the addition of two sets of arrays have been transported to the space station through previous missions, the original arrays will be relocated to their permanent position at the very end of the left side of the truss.
Since the first building in 1998 of the International Space Station, the whole focus of the construction has been on research while located in low Earth orbit, seen with the naked eye at times. Traveling at a speed of 17,240 miles per hour while completing 15.79 daily orbits, it is a joint project between international space agencies—United States (NASA), Russia (RKA), Japan (JAXA), Canada (CSA), and the European Space Agency which consists of several European countries. The ISS represents a merger between other ideas on space station planning, such as Russia’s Mir 2, or the European Columbus, and the Japanese Experiment Module’s Kibo.
This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Mission Objectives, Space Agency News, 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.
