Shuttle crew moves into home stretch of final shuttle mission
By WILLIAM HARWOOD
CBS News
Work to move supplies and equipment into the International Space Station and to reload a shuttle cargo module with trash, packing material and no-longer-needed gear is about 78 percent complete as the Atlantis astronauts move into the home stretch of NASA's final shuttle mission.
The four-member crew was awakened at 11:29 p.m. EDT (GMT-4) Friday by Beyonce Knowles' "Run the World (Girls)" beamed up from mission control.
"Good morning Atlantis," the Houston native said in a recorded message to the crew. "This is Beyonce. Sandy, Chris, Doug and Rex, you inspire all of us to dare to live our dreams, to know that we're smart enough and strong enough to achieve them. This song is especially for my girl Sandy and all the women who've taken us to space with them, and the girls who are our future explorers."
"And good morning, Houston, and a big thanks to Beyonce for taking some time out of her schedule to record us a greeting," Magnus replied. "We're ready for another day here on Atlantis and hopefully, with the team at NASA, we can keep our inspirational work up for the young people of America."
Space station Flight Director Courtenay McMillan said the astronauts are ahead of schedule with their logistics transfer work and will focus Saturday on packing up the Raffaello multi-purpose logistics module for return to Earth aboard Atlantis.
"Transfer is going really well," McMillan said. "We're at about, I think the magic number right now is 78 percent complete and the crew is really focusing on packing the MPLM at this point. So pretty much everything that we need on the station is moved over, almost everything is moved over. For the MPLM, they're really focusing on getting it configured for return."
With nearly five tons of supplies and equipment moved into the space station, "there's a lot of stuff now ... and a lot of it is just temporarily stowed in convenient locations to get the transfer done," McMillan said. "We're going to try to start getting the crew into basically unpacking that and putting it in its final location so things are a little better organized and it will not take them so much time to find things after undocking."
With any luck, she added, "they'll be able to use some of the (logistics) transfer time today to get that done on the station side while the shuttle crew are packing up the MPLM."
The station crew also planned to continue repair work on a high-tech treadmill in the Russian segment of the lab complex that failed earlier. A new gyroscope for the treadmill's vibration isolation system was delivered by the Atlantis astronauts, but that did not solve the problem.
"So today we've got a little bit of troubleshooting, then we're going to go after the next box that could be causing a problem, which is the vibration isolation system controller unit, which basically is the brains that powers the vibration isolation system, including the gyro," McMillan said.
Flight controllers are continuing to assess the health of a shuttle flight computer that shut down Thursday evening. General Purpose Computer No. 4 was successfully restarted Friday and placed in standby mode, but engineers studying telemetry from the system have not yet figured out what went wrong. Later today, GPC-4 likely will be taken out of standby mode for additional analysis.
"So far, no definitive cause for its unexpected shutdown late in the day on Thursday has been identified, but the leading cause ... could be radiation, simply a transient shutdown of that general purpose computer," said Rob Navias, NASA's mission control commentator. "GPC-4 is likely to be expanded into the set of operational general purpose computers, brought up from its freeze-dried, or hibernated, mode later today and could run for about seven hours so more data can be collected on its general health."
Here is an updated timeline of the crew's planned activities for flight day nine (in EDT and mission elapsed time; includes revision J of the NASA television schedule; best viewed with fixed-width font):
CBS News
Work to move supplies and equipment into the International Space Station and to reload a shuttle cargo module with trash, packing material and no-longer-needed gear is about 78 percent complete as the Atlantis astronauts move into the home stretch of NASA's final shuttle mission.
The four-member crew was awakened at 11:29 p.m. EDT (GMT-4) Friday by Beyonce Knowles' "Run the World (Girls)" beamed up from mission control.
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| The view from International Space Station early Saturday. (Credit: NASA TV) |
"And good morning, Houston, and a big thanks to Beyonce for taking some time out of her schedule to record us a greeting," Magnus replied. "We're ready for another day here on Atlantis and hopefully, with the team at NASA, we can keep our inspirational work up for the young people of America."
Space station Flight Director Courtenay McMillan said the astronauts are ahead of schedule with their logistics transfer work and will focus Saturday on packing up the Raffaello multi-purpose logistics module for return to Earth aboard Atlantis.
"Transfer is going really well," McMillan said. "We're at about, I think the magic number right now is 78 percent complete and the crew is really focusing on packing the MPLM at this point. So pretty much everything that we need on the station is moved over, almost everything is moved over. For the MPLM, they're really focusing on getting it configured for return."
With nearly five tons of supplies and equipment moved into the space station, "there's a lot of stuff now ... and a lot of it is just temporarily stowed in convenient locations to get the transfer done," McMillan said. "We're going to try to start getting the crew into basically unpacking that and putting it in its final location so things are a little better organized and it will not take them so much time to find things after undocking."
With any luck, she added, "they'll be able to use some of the (logistics) transfer time today to get that done on the station side while the shuttle crew are packing up the MPLM."
The station crew also planned to continue repair work on a high-tech treadmill in the Russian segment of the lab complex that failed earlier. A new gyroscope for the treadmill's vibration isolation system was delivered by the Atlantis astronauts, but that did not solve the problem.
"So today we've got a little bit of troubleshooting, then we're going to go after the next box that could be causing a problem, which is the vibration isolation system controller unit, which basically is the brains that powers the vibration isolation system, including the gyro," McMillan said.
Flight controllers are continuing to assess the health of a shuttle flight computer that shut down Thursday evening. General Purpose Computer No. 4 was successfully restarted Friday and placed in standby mode, but engineers studying telemetry from the system have not yet figured out what went wrong. Later today, GPC-4 likely will be taken out of standby mode for additional analysis.
"So far, no definitive cause for its unexpected shutdown late in the day on Thursday has been identified, but the leading cause ... could be radiation, simply a transient shutdown of that general purpose computer," said Rob Navias, NASA's mission control commentator. "GPC-4 is likely to be expanded into the set of operational general purpose computers, brought up from its freeze-dried, or hibernated, mode later today and could run for about seven hours so more data can be collected on its general health."
Here is an updated timeline of the crew's planned activities for flight day nine (in EDT and mission elapsed time; includes revision J of the NASA television schedule; best viewed with fixed-width font):
DATE/EDT...DD...HH...MM...SS...EVENT
07/15
11:29 PM...07...12...00...00...Crew wakeup
07/16
01:04 AM...07...13...35...00...ISS daily planning conference
02:49 AM...07...15...20...00...MPLM cargo transfers resume
06:24 AM...07...18...55...00...Crew choice recording
06:54 AM...07...19...25...00...Joint crew meal
07:54 AM...07...20...25...00...MPLM cargo transfers resume
07:54 AM...07...20...25...00...Russian EVA-29 tools configured
11:00 AM...07...23...31...00...Replay of Atlantis flag tribute
11:44 AM...08...00...15...00...Transfer tagup
12:00 PM...08...00...31...00...Replay of Atlantis tribute to naval aviation
01:00 PM...08...01...31...00...Replay of Atlantis flag tribute
02:29 PM...08...03...00...00...ISS crew sleep begins
03:30 PM...08...04...01...00...Mission status briefing on NASA TV
02:59 PM...08...03...30...00...STS crew sleep begins
05:00 PM...09...05...31...00...Flight day 9 highlights on NASA TV
08:00 PM...08...08...31...00..."The Space Shuttle" video on NASA TV
10:00 PM...08...10...31...00..."Launching our Dreams" video on NASA TV
10:59 PM...08...11...30...00...Crew wakeup
11:30 PM...08...12...01...00...Flight director update on NASA TV