|
|
|
|
|
Discovery heads for space station on 25th birthday BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: August 30, 2009 
The shuttle Discovery, marking the 25th anniversary of its maiden launch in 1984, closed in on the International Space Station Sunday, on course for a docking around 9:04 p.m. EDT.
Approaching from behind and below, Sturckow will pause the approach around 8:02 p.m. at a distance of 600 feet directly below the space station. In a now-routine maneuver, Discovery will perform a slow back-flip, allowing the space station crew to photograph the heat shield tiles on the ship's belly with powerful telephoto lenses. Those pictures will be downlinked to engineers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, who are assessing launch-day imagery and laser scans from an inspection by the astronauts Saturday to look for any signs of ascent impact damage. So far, there are no indications of any problems with Discovery's heat shield. After pausing for the rendezvous, or rotational, pitch maneuver, Sturckow plans to guide Discovery in an arc up to a point about 400 feet directly in front of the space station with the shuttle's nose pointing toward space and its open payload bay facing a docking port on the front end of the Harmony module. From there, he plans to manually guide the spaceplane to a docking with the 700,000-pound station at 9:04 p.m. "We'll march right in on the v-bar (velocity vector) from about 400 feet in, controlling our closure the whole way," Ford said in a pre-launch interview. "At that point, C.J. is just looking out the overhead window and through the centerline camera and he'll just make inputs so that as we get closer and closer, we'll fly a tighter and tighter tolerance until we're down to a 3-inch tolerance at the end and about a decimal-one-foot per second closure rate as we fly into the capture mechanism. "It is pretty dynamic and the center of gravity of the space shuttle is well below where the docking port is so there's a time where there's a little bit of what we call 'ringing' going on where the motions ... are kind of ringing out. There are dampers on the docking mechanism that will kill all that motion finally." The only issue going into today's docking procedure was the loss of small vernier steering jets due to a leaking forward thruster that was isolated Saturday. While the small thrusters are useful during docking and later, to help control the attitude, or orientation, of the space station, Sturckow and his crewmates have trained to make the approach using more powerful primary thrusters and flight controllers don't expect any problems. "We'll start off by doing a series of burns that will adjust our trajectory to get on the proper profile and then, after that, we will have the manual phase, we'll take over and fly from the aft flight deck of the shuttle," Sturckow said in a NASA interview. "We'll fly up underneath the space station and then perform the RPM, the R-bar pitch maneuver where we'll expose the belly of the space shuttle to the station so they can image it with cameras up there, the station crew can, to make sure all the tiles are in good shape. After that, we'll fly out in front of the station and then fly in on what we call the v-bar approach, fly in and dock with the space station." Sturckow, Ford, flight engineer Jose Hernandez, Patrick Forrester, John "Danny" Olivas, European Space Agency astronaut Christer Fuglesang and incoming space station flight engineer Nicole Stott will be welcomed aboard by Expedition 20 commander Gennady Padalka, Michael Barratt, Timothy Kopra, cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, European Space Agency astronaut Frank De Winne and Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk. After a brief safety briefing to familiarize the shuttle astronauts with station operations, the crews will split up and get to work, beginning the transfer of equipment and supplies to the station and using the lab's robot arm to pluck Discovery's heat shield inspection boom from the ship's cargo bay and hand it off to the shuttle's robot arm. Stott, who is replacing Kopra aboard the station, will help move her custom Soyuz seat liner to the station. Once it is in place, she will become a member of the space station's Expedition 20 crew and Kopra will join Discovery's crew. Assuming an on-time landing Sept. 10, Kopra will have logged 57 days in space since launch July 15 aboard the shuttle Endeavour. A mission status briefing is planned for 12 a.m. Monday. Here is an updated timeline of today's activity (in EDT and mission elapsed time; includes revision F of the NASA television schedule): EDT........DD...HH...MM...EVENT Flight Day 3 (Updated 08/30/09) 08/30 01:29 PM...01...13...30...00...STS/ISS crew wakeup 02:59 PM...01...15...00...00...ISS daily planning conference 03:09 PM...01...15...10...00...Group B computer powerup 03:29 PM...01...15...30...00...Rendezvous timeline begins 04:00 PM...01...16...01...00...Post-MMT briefing on NTV 04:19 PM...01...16...20...00...Spacesuits removed from airlock 04:53 PM...01...16...54...19...NC-4 rendezvous rocket firing 06:26 PM...01...18...26...40...TI burn 07:02 PM...01...19...02...40...Sunset 07:04 PM...01...19...04...40...Range: 30,000 feet 07:08 PM...01...19...08...23...U.S. arrays feathered 07:24 PM...01...19...25...16...Range: 10,000 feet 07:28 PM...01...19...28...23...ISS maneuver start 07:33 PM...01...19...33...23...ISS in docking attitude 07:33 PM...01...19...33...56...Range: 5,000 feet 07:33 PM...01...19...33...58...Sunrise 07:39 PM...01...19...39...25...Range: 3,000 feet 07:43 PM...01...19...43...34...MC-4 rendezvous burn 07:47 PM...01...19...47...34...Range: 1,500 feet 07:48 PM...01...19...49...12...RPM start window open 07:52 PM...01...19...52...34...Range: 1,000 feet 07:55 PM...01...19...55...34...KU antenna to low power 07:56 PM...01...19...56...34...+R bar arrival directly below ISS 08:01 PM...01...20...01...46...Range: 600 feet 08:03 PM...01...20...03...40...Start pitch maneuver 08:03 PM...01...20...04...08...Noon 08:10 PM...01...20...11...04...RPM full photo window close 08:11 PM...01...20...11...40...End pitch maneuver 08:13 PM...01...20...14...16...Initiate pitch up maneuver (575 ft) 08:19 PM...01...20...19...30...RPM start window close 08:25 PM...01...20...25...46...+V bar arrival; range: 310 feet 08:26 PM...01...20...26...36...Range: 300 feet 08:30 PM...01...20...30...46...Range: 250 feet 08:33 PM...01...20...34...18...Sunset 08:34 PM...01...20...34...56...Range: 200 feet 08:37 PM...01...20...37...26...Range: 170 feet 08:38 PM...01...20...39...06...Range: 150 feet 08:42 PM...01...20...43...16...Range: 100 feet 08:45 PM...01...20...46...16...Range: 75 feet 08:50 PM...01...20...50...26...Range: 50 feet 08:53 PM...01...20...53...46...Range: 30 feet; start stationkeeping 08:58 PM...01...20...58...46...End stationkeeping; push to dock 09:02 PM...01...21...03...06...Range: 10 feet 09:04 PM...01...21...04...47...DOCKING 09:05 PM...01...21...05...30...Sunrise 09:29 PM...01...21...30...00...Leak checks 09:59 PM...01...22...00...00...Orbiter docking system prepped 10:04 PM...01...22...05...00...Group B computer powerdown 10:29 PM...01...22...30...00...Post docking laptop reconfig 10:29 PM...01...22...30...00...Hatch open 10:59 PM...01...23...00...00...Welcome aboard! 11:09 PM...01...23...10...00...Safety briefing 11:34 PM...01...23...35...00...Middeck transfers begin 11:34 PM...01...23...35...00...Soyuz seatliner transfer/installation 11:44 PM...01...23...45...00...SSRMS grapples OBSS 08/31 12:00 AM...02...00...01...00...Mission status briefing on NTV 12:14 AM...02...00...15...00...SSRMS unberths OBSS 12:44 AM...02...00...45...00...Soyuz seat line installed 01:04 AM...02...01...05...00...ISS: Sokol suit leak checks 01:44 AM...02...01...15...00...SSRMS hands OBSS to SRMS 01:49 AM...02...01...50...00...Playback ops 02:29 AM...02...02...30...00...ISS evening planning conference 04:59 AM...02...05...00...00...ISS crew sleep begins 05:29 AM...02...05...30...00...STS crew sleep begins 06:00 AM...02...06...02...00...Daily highlights reel on NTV 12:00 PM...02...12...01...00...Flight director's update 01:29 PM...02...13...30...00...Crew wakeup
|
|
|
|
 |
|
VIDEO:
NARRATED PREVIEW OF RENDEZVOUS AND DOCKING 