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The station crew will activate the propulsion system by sending a retreat command to the HTV from a control panel inside the complex.

The ship arrived at the station Sept. 17 with 5,475 pounds of pressurized cargo and two large external science payloads that were plucked from the spacecraft and attached to the outpost's outdoor science deck.

The rendezvous with the space station came six days after the HTV launched from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan.

Canadian astronaut Bob Thirk slowly removed the bus-sized spacecraft from its port on the Harmony module shortly after 11 a.m. EDT this morning.

Thirsk is manning the controls of the station's robotic arm for the maneuver.

Plans call for astronaut Nicole Stott to take over and release the arm's firm grasp on the cargo ship around 1:30 p.m. EDT as the outpost flies 214 miles over the Pacific Ocean.

The craft will be guided by Japanese flight controllers to its demise over the southern Pacific Ocean on Sunday. Atmospheric re-entry is expected at about 4:25 p.m. EDT.

The crew completed removing the 5,475 pounds of supplies inside the pressurized section Tuesday, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The equipment the HTV brought to the station included food, payloads, crew provisions, computer equipment, a small Japanese robot arm, and an assortment of other cargo.

Two unpressurized scientific experiments were also transferred to the station a week after the HTV's arrival on Sept. 17.

Officials plan to put about 1,600 pounds of garbage in the HTV to be destroyed when the ship leaves the station.

The bus-sized spacecraft is due to depart the complex on Oct. 30 and re-enter the atmosphere on Nov. 4.

The crew will unberth the 33-foot-long vehicle with the station's robot arm, move it to a release point just below the outpost, then let go to allow the ship to fly away.

After a series of orbit-lowering engine burns, the HTV will plummet back into the atmosphere Nov. 4 for a destructive re-entry over the South Pacific.

The cargo carrier was pushed back into the H-2 Transfer Vehicle's unpressurized section like a dresser drawer, using guide rails to lock the pallet into place.

Astronauts removed the pallet from the Kibo laboratory's exposed facility shortly after 0900 GMT (5 a.m. EDT), beginning more than four hours of robotic operations using both Japanese and Canadian arms on the station.

The pallet was handed off from the Japanese robot arm to the larger Canadian manipulator, which completed the transfer task around 1320 GMT (9:20 a.m. EDT), according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Friday's milestone wrapped up three straight days of intense robotics work that began Wednesday with the removal of the pallet from the HTV and its placement on the station.

European flight engineer Frank De Winne used the Japanese arm Thursday to move the HREP and SMILES experiments from the carrier to their new homes on the outpost's external science platform.

NASA's HREP payload includes two different experiments to observe the oceans and atmosphere. The SMILES instrument from JAXA will detect trace gases in the ozone layer using a submillimeter sounder.

The six-person station crew is continuing work to transfer more than 5,000 pounds of supplies inside the HTV's pressurized module. That equipment includes food, clothing, experiments and computer hardware, among other items.

A NASA spokesperson said mission managers have set Oct. 30 as the HTV's departure date. The 33-foot-long spacecraft will be unberthed and set free from the station's robot arm to begin a two-day sequence of maneuvers setting up for a destructive re-entry over the South Pacific.

The HREP and SMILES payloads were attached to the Kibo laboratory's exposed facility, an outdoor science deck designed to house experiments in the vacuum of space.

De Winne moved both experiments Thursday, completing the transfer tasks at about 1612 GMT (12:12 p.m. EDT), according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The 839-pound HREP payload, provided by NASA, holds two experiments to study the oceans and atmosphere. HREP's ocean sensor will focus on coastal features, and the atmospheric ultraviolet and visible instrument will look at the ionosphere and thermosphere.

A few hours later, JAXA's SMILES instrument was moved to the station. SMILES will detect trace gases in the ozone layer using a submillimeter sounder. The 1,049-pound payload will help determine the extent of human activity's affects on ozone.

The experiments were bolted to a pallet carried to the station by the H-2 Transfer Vehicle, a first-of-its-kind spacecraft that launched from Japan earlier this month and arrived at the complex last week.

The Canadian and Japanese robot arms removed the pallet from the HTV's unpressurized section and mounted it at a temporary location on the station Wednesday.

The station's crew will again use robotics to put the now-empty carrier back into the HTV tomorrow.

Flight engineer Nicole Stott, at the controls of the station's large robot arm, pulled the pallet from the H-2 Transfer Vehicle shortly after 0900 GMT (5 a.m. EDT), a NASA spokesperson said.

After sliding out of the ship on guide rails, the crate was handed off to the Kibo laboratory's smaller robot arm at 1030 GMT (6:30 a.m. EDT) for placement on Location No. 10 of the Japanese module's exposed facility.

European astronaut Frank De Winne was controlling the Japanese arm during Wednesday's operation.

Electricity for the pallet's two payloads, which are on keep-alive power, was provied through the arm during the transfer.

The pallet's move was completed at about 1332 GMT (9:32 a.m. EDT).

The HTV is the first visiting vehicle, other than the space shuttle, with the ability to deliver external hardware to the outpost. The pallet can hold large experiments or massive spares to replace failed components on the station.

This first HTV mission did not carry its full capacity of logistics because the craft was filled with extra fuel for demonstration tasks during the ship's rendezvous sequence.

The payloads on this flight are two science investigations for NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA.

The 839-pound NASA payload, called HREP, holds two experiments to study the oceans and atmosphere. HREP's ocean sensor will focus on coastal features, and the atmospheric ultraviolet and visible instrument will look at the ionosphere and thermosphere.

JAXA's SMILES experiment will detect trace gases in the ozone layer using a submillimeter sounder. The 1,049-pound instrument will help determine the extent of human activity's affects on ozone.

HREP and SMILES are the station's first significant science payloads devoted to Earth science.

"Those are very critical things for us to understand relative to understanding our environment and how we affect it. It's good to be able to finally start having this kind of research on board the ISS," said Mike Suffredini, NASA's space station program manager.

On Thursday, De Winne will again use the Japanese manipulator to remove both experiments and put them at their long-term homes on the outside of the Kibo lab.

HREP will be transferred first to Location No. 6 on the science deck. SMILES will follow a few hours later to Location No. 3.

If all goes as planned, De Winne grapple the empty pallet with the Japanese arm on Friday and hand it off to the larger Canadian arm, which will delicately roll the carrier back into the HTV's unpressurized section.

"The pallet is removed and inserted a lot like a common dresser drawer. It's got wheels along the edges of the pallet and there are guide rails inside the HTV," said Dana Weigel, NASA's lead flight director for the mission.

A camera is located inside the HTV's cargo bay to help astronauts guide the pallet into the spacecraft.

After the HTV's arrival at the station last week, the crew opened hatches and ingressed the ship's pressurized module Friday. That milestone began several weeks of unpacking some 5,475 pounds of cargo inside bags and racks.

It will take an estimated 70 crew hours to remove and stow the equipment, according to Weigel.

The supplies include 1,890 pounds of food, 1,249 pounds of pressurized payloads, 1,149 pounds of JAXA equipment, 384 pounds of crew provisions, and 215 pounds of computer hardware.

Once the fresh cargo is unloaded, the crew will gather trash to pack inside the HTV for disposal.

Certified for a stay of nearly two months, the HTV's exact departure date is still being reviewed. Unberthing and release is currently penciled in for early November.

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VIDEO: HTV MANEUVERED INTO DOCKING PORT AND ATTACHED PLAY
VIDEO: ROBOTIC ARM REACHES OUT AND GRABS THE HTV PLAY
VIDEO: THE CARGO FREIGHTER APPROACHES THE STATION PLAY
VIDEO: OVERVIEW OF THE HTV MISSION FROM START TO FINISH PLAY
VIDEO: LAUNCH AS SEEN FROM PRESS SITE PLAY | HI-DEF
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Engineers will finish activating the HTV overnight and the crew will open hatches between Harmony and the HTV and ingress the ship at about 1820 GMT (2:20 p.m. EDT) Friday.

External payload transfers are on tap for late next week.

"A few minutes after capture, Bob Thirsk will begin positioning HTV for inspection of its passive common berthing mechanism," said Dana Weigel, lead NASA flight director for today's operations.

The crew will document the berthing mechanism through the Harmony's nadir window.

Meanwhile, engineers in Japan are transitioning the HTV's systems to a dormant state for its one-and-a-half month stay at the station.

The final berthing sequence is expected to begin around 2200 GMT tonight, according to the crew's timeline for today.

Once the crew receives the "go" to pluck the HTV from space, De Winne will use a control panel inside the station to disable the vehicle's thrusters and put the propulsion system in a "free drift" mode. That will start a 99-second clock for Stott to extend the 58-foot-long robot arm while the HTV is still stable.

"I am expecting that the track and capture of the HTV will be very close to a fixed grapple of a payload in the payload bay or something on station. My understanding of the hardware is that it's going to be a very stable vehicle. It's a very large vehicle, which kind of induces that stability as well," Stott said.

Japanese engineers at the HTV control center in Tsukuba, near Tokyo, have given their approval to proceed with capture. A final "go" will come from Houston in about 10 minutes.

Frank De Winne has confirmed the grapple fixture on the HTV is aligned with the end effector of the space station robot arm and the ship is controlling well inside the capture box.

According the timeline, the HTV should resume its flight around 1908 GMT and continue to the capture box just 30 feet below the station around 1930 GMT.

Dana Weigel, NASA's lead HTV flight director, discussed the challenges associated with the free-flying capture before launch. Today's capture is the first for the space station.

"When the vehicle arrives at the capture point, it's controlling with its thrusters. Then the crew takes it to free drift, which means we shut off all of its thruster systems and it's just drifting. You can get a build-up of residual rates if we had a leftover from its controlling rates, and then also orbital mechanics will start taking the vehicle away. One of the big challenges that we face with a free-flyer capture versus a fixed capture is that vehicle typically has some small rotational and translational rate."

"From a crew standpoint, they're trying to exactly match that rate as they come over the grapple fixture," Weigel said.

Nicole Stott will soon maneuver the robot arm into a hover position to prepare for grapple.

"Japan and Europe have their own supply vehicles now. After the space shuttle starts to fade away, we will take over responsibility to bring stuff up to the space station. So I think this is a great way to start our mutual helping of each other to make station more operational. We're really looking forward to the success of this mission," Noguchi said.

Noguchi will launch to the station in December as a flight engineer on Expedition 22.

The transit from the 300-meter point to the 30-meter hold position was targeted to last about 40 minutes, and Janice Voss recently told the crew the rendezvous was only one minute behind the timeline.

Controllers have also switched the HTV's propulsion system back to String A. The ship had swapped strings earlier to battle rising temperatures inside thrusters.

"Now that we're on RCS String B, we are seeing increasing temperatures on the two nadir thrusters on that string. We think this is due to heavy usage of those thrusters during stationkeeping, so we're going to shorten the stationkeeping periods in the forward plan," Voss said.

The astronauts will still conduct the upcoming retreat demo, but instead of allowing the HTV to move back to the 300-meter point, the ship will hold shortly after the test before continuing its approach to a hold point at 30 meters, or 100 feet.

"OK, Janice, we copy very well the big picture words," European astronaut Frank De Winne replied.

A few minutes after departing the 300-meter hold point, the crew will command the HTV to do a manual retreat back to the 300-meter mark. This will be an important test to ensure the crew can intervene if they see problems developing later on in today's rendezvous.

"HTV is seeing some increasing temperatures on their RCS A-string. We are going to do a propulsion string swap to the B-string, so that'll delay the yaw maneuver a little bit," CAPCOM astronaut Janice Voss radioed the crew.

"OK, copy, understand. We're standing by," Nicole Stott replied.

The HTV has two redundant primary strings controlling the propulsion system, each tied to two main engines and 14 maneuvering thrusters.

JAXA says the HTV arrived at the 300-meter hold point right on time around 1648 GMT, but the ship's 180-degree yaw maneuver has been delayed until 1724 GMT because of concerns about sun glare in the spacecraft's Earth sensor. The yaw-around was to have occurred about 20 minutes ago.

The yaw maneuver will take about 10 minutes and is necessary to better position the HTV for a potential abort later in the rendezvous, if something goes wrong.

The HTV should now be arriving at the rendezvous insertion point 500 meters, or 1,640 feet, below the complex. At that point, the spacecraft will switch its navigation system from relative GPS to the laser sensor, which shoots beams of light toward the station for precise range and closing rate information.

"We have a laser head installed on the HTV side which will shoot the laser beam to the reflectors. By measuring the distance and also the angle of the returned signal, we'll know the XYZ position relative to the ISS," said Hiro Uematsu, a senior engineer on the HTV spacecraft.

Space station cameras earlier this morning spotted the HTV as it was flying a a few miles behind the station, appearing as a bright star trailing the complex.

Read our docking preview story.

The H-2 Transfer Vehicle, launched last Thursday, has been tweaking its trajectory to the space station over the last five days through a series of engine firings.

The bus-sized spacecraft also successfully completed several demonstrations Friday night and Saturday to prove the vehicle could execute emergency commands to abort its approach if something goes wrong near the station.

Officials met earlier this week to review the results from those tests and evaluate the status of the HTV before it is committed to rendezvous operations.

The International Space Station Mission Management Team adjourned with a "go" to continue the final phase of the rendezvous, which begins at 0003 GMT Wednesday with a height adjustment maneuver to raise the ship's altitude to match the orbit of the complex.

Wednesday's HAM 1 engine burn is the largest maneuver for the spacecraft between launch and arrival at the station.

More burns are on tap beginning early Thursday to bring the HTV within about three miles of the station, where the vehicle will commence its final approach around 1529 GMT.

The HTV will also conduct more demonstrations incorporating the station's crew as it passes within 1,000 feet of the outpost.

Astronaut Nicole Stott will be standing by at the controls of the station's robotic arm, ready to grapple the supply ship as it flies about 30 feet below the complex's Kibo laboratory module.

Current estimates place the grapple time around 1950 GMT Thursday. The HTV will be moved to the Harmony module's downward-facing port for berthing a few hours later.