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Astronauts gear up for rendezvous and docking BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: February 9, 2008 The Atlantis astronauts, closing in on the international space station, are gearing up for docking today to wrap up a two-day orbital chase. Looping below the lab complex and then up to a point directly in front of the station, commander Steve Frick plans to manually guide Atlantis to a linkup around 12:25 p.m. Frick, pilot Alan Poindexter, flight engineer Rex Walheim, Leland Melvin, Stan Love and European Space Agency astronauts Hans Schlegel and Leopold Eyharts were awakened at 4:45 a.m. today by a recording of Garrison Keillor singing about powdermilk biscuits from "A Prairie Home Companion." "Good morning Atlantis," astronaut Shannon Lucid radioed from mission control. "And an especially great good morning to you today, Steve. It's a great day for rendezvous." "Hey, thanks very much, Shannon," Frick replied. "Thanks very much to my wonderful wife, Jennifer, for a little powdermilk biscuits to wake up to in the morning. Our food's really healthy here on orbit, but we can still dream of some of the brown stains on the bag that indicate freshness." The terminal phase of the rendezvous will begin at 9:37 a.m. with a rocket firing as the shuttle trails the station by about 9.2 miles. Approaching from behind and below, Frick will guide the orbiter a point about 600 feet directly under the space station a few minutes past 11 a.m. At that point, he will fire thrusters to pitch the shuttle around in a slow back flip known as a rotational, or rendezvous, pitch maneuver, or RPM. As the shuttle's belly rotates into view, the station astronauts will use powerful telephoto lenses to capture high-resolution digital pictures of Atlantis' heat shield tiles. They also will photograph insulation blankets on the upper surfaces of the orbiter to help analysts on the ground assess the overall health of the shuttle's thermal protection system. "The rendezvous pitch maneuver certainly is something that we like because it gives us a chance to get detailed photography of the entire shuttle to see the condition of the thermal protection system and really all the surfaces," Frick said in a NASA interview. "We're really excited that NASA was able to come up with such an interesting way to get a free inspection, basically. "The maneuver from the shuttle side is very similar to the way it was when Eileen Collins' crew did it the first time. We pull up in our normal rendezvous profile, up underneath the space station about 600 feet away, and we just do a 360-degree flip, stop it when we're done, and then proceed with the rest of the rendezvous. For the space station crew, though, they're working harder and harder every time we do this. The first time we did it we just took photographs of the tile underneath the orbiter, and then we realized that the photography they took was so good and so accurate and detailed that, hey, there are other areas in the shuttle we could take a look at for free. So now they photograph the nose, the top of the orbiter, they photograph the engines on the back, the OMS [Orbital Maneuvering System] pods. So we basically map virtually the whole orbiter during that 360 degree flip maneuver. "For us, we just do the flip and we proceed on into rendezvous and dock," Frick said. "The space station crew works real hard for that just couple of minutes when we're doing the flip, taking the photography, and then they get it right in their computers and get it downlinked to the ground so the ground starts looking at it within, sometimes, 40 to 45 minutes of when we've done the maneuver. We have the easy part‹just a couple minutes of work. The ground then has the hard part which is many hours of analyzing all that photography to look for the smallest defects." While the station crew is busy photographing Atlantis, the shuttle astronauts will enjoy a unique view of the lab complex. "The advantage for us is we get to see the station in a very different way than we ever did before," Frick said. "We're used to just bringing the payload bay of the orbiter up to the space station for the entire rendezvous, so we see it in the same place. We kick off this flip maneuver and we see the station rapidly move over the nose and then a, a couple minutes later rise over the tail almost like a sunrise. It's real interesting and we're hoping to get some, some video of that to, to show the folks on the ground, 'cause it really is a different view than we normally get." When the RPM ends, Atlantis will once again be in a nose-forward, payload-bay-to-station orientation. Frick will then guide the orbiter in a slow loop up to a point roughly 300 feet in front of the lab with the shuttle's tail facing Earth and its open cargo bay facing the station's docking port. Today's docking will be the first for the station since the Harmony connecting module was attached to the forward end of the U.S. Destiny laboratory last year. The shuttle's docking port, pressurized mating adapter No. 2, was removed from Destiny and attached to the front end of Harmony. Atlantis' payload, the European Columbus research module, will be attached to Harmony's right-side port on Sunday. "Obviously, the station's a little bit longer so it looks a little different, and we'll be in a little different position when we finally dock because of the length of (Harmony)," Frick said. "You're just at the end of a longer ship now. It's a little bit different, there isn't quite as much wiring going to the PMA now so we don't have as much redundancy when we dock to take care of the things that have to happen automatically, but Peggy [Whitson] and her crew have trained in order to cover those actions if they don't happen automatically, and we also have the ability to do that. So we just have to watch a few more things, but other than that it's going to be very similar to the last time." After the shuttle docks, leak checks will be carried out and hatches will be opened around 1:30 p.m. for a traditional "welcome aboard." After a safety briefing to familiarize the shuttle crew with emergency procedures on the station, the astronauts will get busy transferring equipment for Sunday's spacewalk. The crew also will use the station's robot arm to pull the shuttle's heat shield inspection boom out of the payload bay and hand it off to Atlantis' robot arm. The boom will be used to provide additional television views of critical mission events as well as a focused heat shield inspection if necessary. More important, the boom must be moved out of the way before the Columbus module can be unberthed on Sunday. "It's an interesting ballet we have to do," Frick said. "Certainly we want to fly the boom because we need to inspect the orbiter's thermal protection system, especially the RCC (reinforced carbon-carbon) on the leading edge of the wings and the nose, but when we carry a large payload like Columbus up it's a pretty tight fit in the payload bay. And when you add this large boom on one side of the orbiter for the entire flight, we have to have some way to get it out of the way to be able to pull the Columbus module out and move it into position. "It turns out it just would not fit very well if we had that boom in place. So after we dock the first thing we have to do is pull the boom out to get it out of the way for the next day when we get Columbus out of the bay. But the funny thing is, we can't actually reach it with the orbiter arm once we dock, so the station arm has to come down and grab it in a different location, pull it off of the orbiter, move it out to the side, and then the shuttle robotic arm will come in and grab it and take the hand-off from the station arm and move it out of the way so we'll be all set for the next day's activities." Repeating from Friday, here is an updated timeline of today's activities (in EST and mission elapsed time): DATE/EDT...DD...HH...MM...EVENT 02/09/08 04:45 AM...01...14...00...STS/ISS crew wakeup 06:15 AM...01...15...30...Group B computer powerup 06:30 AM...01...15...45...Space station (ISS) daily planning conference 06:30 AM...01...15...45...Begin rendezvous timeline 08:06 AM...01...17...21...NC-4 rendezvous rocket firing 08:50 AM...01...18...05...Middeck prepped for docking 09:05 AM...01...18...20...Spacesuits removed from airlock 09:37 AM...01...18...52...Terminal initiation (TI) rocket firing 09:45 AM...01...19...00...Station in docking orientation 10:10 AM...01...19...25...U.S. solar arrays feathered 10:12 AM...01...19...27...Station in rendezvous mode 10:15 AM...01...19...30...Sunset 10:15 AM...01...19...30...Russian command module lights on 10:36 AM...01...19...51...Range: 10,000 feet 10:44 AM...01...19...59...Range: 5,000 feet 10:50 AM...01...20...05...Range: 3,000 feet 10:52 AM...01...20...07...Sunrise 10:54 AM...01...20...09...MC-4 rendezvous rocket firing 10:58 AM...01...20...13...Range: 1,500 feet 11:03 AM...01...20...18...Range: 1,000 feet 11:06 AM...01...20...21...Shuttle KU antenna to low power 11:07 AM...01...20...22...Shuttle directly below station 11:12 AM...01...20...27...Range: 600 feet 11:19 AM...01...20...34...Noon 11:23 AM...01...20...38...Start shuttle pitch-around photo survey maneuver 11:27 AM...01...20...42...RPM full photo window close 11:31 AM...01...20...46...End pitch maneuver 11:34 AM...01...20...49...Initiate pitch up maneuver to point ahead of station 11:35 AM...01...20...50...Russian solar arrays feathered 11:45 AM...01...21...00...Shuttle directly ahead of station 11:46 AM...01...21...01...Range: 300 feet 11:47 AM...01...21...02...Sunset 11:50 AM...01...21...05...Range: 250 feet 11:54 AM...01...21...09...Range: 200 feet 11:57 AM...01...21...12...Range: 170 feet 11:59 AM...01...21...14...Range: 150 feet 12:03 PM...01...21...18...Range: 100 feet 12:06 PM...01...21...21...Range: 75 feet 12:10 PM...01...21...25...Range: 50 feet 12:13 PM...01...21...28...Range: 30 feet; start stationkeeping 12:18 PM...01...21...33...End stationkeeping; push to dock 12:23 PM...01...21...38...Range: 10 feet 12:23 PM...01...21...38...Sunrise 12:24 PM...01...21...39...DOCKING 12:45 PM...01...22...00...Leak checks 01:10 PM...01...22...25...Group B computer power down 01:15 PM...01...22...30...Docking system prepped for ingress 01:35 PM...01...22...50...Hatch opening 01:35 PM...01...22...50...Post-rendezvous laptop reconfig 02:05 PM...01...23...20...Safety briefing 02:55 PM...02...00...10...Station arm (SSRMS) grapples shuttle inspection boom (OBSS) 03:00 PM...02...00...15...Mission status briefing on NTV 03:25 PM...02...00...40...SSRMS unberths OBSS 03:55 PM...02...01...10...Airlock preps 04:30 PM...02...01...45...Shuttle arm (SRMS) grapples OBSS 04:45 PM...02...02...00...SSRMS ungrapples OBSS 05:00 PM...02...02...15...Post-MMT briefing on NTV (may move earlier) 05:25 PM...02...02...40...Spacewalk No. 1 (EVA-1): Procedures review 07:00 PM...02...04...15...EVA-1: Mask pre-breathe for campout 07:55 PM...02...05...10...EVA-1: Campout begins (10.2 psi depress) 08:15 PM...02...05...30...Station crew sleep begins 08:45 PM...02...06...00...Shuttle crew sleep begin 09:00 PM...02...06...15...Daily video highlights reel
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