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Shuttle Endeavour on course for station docking tonight BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: March 12, 2008 The Endeavour astronauts are closing in on the international space station today, on track for a docking around 11:25 p.m. to kick off a five-spacewalk assembly mission. The shuttle crew was awakened at 4 p.m. by a recording of Blue Oyster Cult's "Godzilla" beamed up from Houston for Japanese astronaut Takao Doi. "We are very happy to hear 'Godzilla,'" Doi radioed. "We are ready to go and we'll have a great time today docking with the space station. Arigato." "Arigato," astronaut Al Drew replied from the Johnson Space Center. "Take on the day like a monster." The terminal phase of the rendezvous will begin around 8:42 p.m. with a critical rocket firing as Endeavour trails the station by about 9.2 miles. After reaching a point about 600 feet directly below the lab complex, commander Dominic Gorie will fire maneuvering jets to put the shuttle through a slow 360-degree back flip, exposing the ship's heat shield to cameras on the space station. "The rendezvous pitch maneuver is a 360-degree pitch almost like a loop where we expose the bottom of the orbiter to the space station where they have some very powerful cameras," Gorie said in a NASA interview. "And with those cameras, they are able to detect whether there's any white tile showing on the surface of the orbiter and that would mean that the black coating on the belly tiles has been damaged. "During the RPM, the commander is in charge of the orbiter and flying the vehicle, so I'll be at the aft station of the space shuttle flight deck and we'll be looking out through the overhead windows as we start this maneuver and make sure that we are in the right position with the right rates. We'll start that off with an auto pilot maneuver that takes us through this hands-off pitch at that point. It's sort of different than anything we've done before as, as astronauts, to be hands-off of the orbiter as we cannot see the space station any more. But the last couple flights that have done this have had great luck and it's worked very well for us." The pictures snapped during the RPM will be downlinked to imagery analysts who are assessing the health of the shuttle's heat shield in a now-standard process intended to identify any possible damage sites before re-entry. The only debris events noted during Endeavour's launching occurred at 10 seconds and 83 seconds after liftoff. The 10-second event may have been a bird that strayed too close to the climbing space shuttle, but lead flight director Mike Moses said earlier today it was not clear whether anything actually hit the shuttle. No signs of damage were seen during an overnight inspection of the shuttle's nose cap and wing leading edge panels. With the RPM complete, Gorie will guide Endeavour to a point about 400 feet directly in front of the space station with the shuttle's tail pointed toward Earth and its open payload bay facing pressurized mating adapter No. 2 on the front end of the station's Harmony module. "We slowly back into the space station with the commander at the controls and flying it manually," Gorie said. "That is one of the most exciting parts of the mission for me. You get to fly formation with the space ship being framed by creation underneath you, that's just spectacular. So it's very easy to get distracted by the beauty of what's going on underneath and the beauty of the space station. Flying formation at that time is a really, really exciting thing that demands everybody on the flight deck to be participating. Everybody has a role in that process so it really relies a lot on teamwork and training." The actual docking, Gorie said, "is really exciting. ... The docking system is a very elaborate, beautifully designed piece of equipment that can connect the two vehicles together after a very slow collision. There are hooks that grab onto the space station, once all of the motions are damped out, with springs like shock absorbers on this extended ring. We slowly draw the two vehicles together with the screw drives that pull it together and after an hour of pressure checks and docking system checks we are able then to open the hatch. But knowing that there's this space station crew on the other side waiting for our arrival, eager to have a replacement for one of their folks and, and some of the re-supply items that we're bringing, it makes it a really an exciting time as well." Space station commander Peggy Whitson, flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko and European Space Agency astronaut Leopold Eyharts will welcome the shuttle crew aboard. After a mandatory safety briefing to familiarize the visiting astronauts with emergency procedures, the crews will get busy transferring spacesuits and other equipment to the station's Quest airlock to prepare for the first spacewalk the following day. The goal of that excursion is to prepare a Japanese logistics module for attachment to the station and to begin assembly of a Canadian Space Agency robot known as the special purpose dextrous manipulator, or Dextre for short. Dextre is an attachment that will, in effect, give the station's Canadian-built robot arm two hands and the ability to remotely change out components that might otherwise require a spacewalk. The disassembled Dextre robot, designed to operate in weightlessness, has been tested but never fully assembled on Earth. It made the climb to space in pieces bolted to a Spacelab pallet in the shuttle's cargo bay. After docking, Robert Behnken and shuttle pilot Gregory Johnson, operating the station's robot arm from inside the Destiny lab module, plan to pull the pallet out of the cargo bay. It will be attached to a grapple fixture on the side of the mobile base system normally used to move the station arm along the front face of the main solar power truss. "Right after we rendezvous we're going to take that SLP and install it in a temporary location on the ISS," Johnson said. "Then through the next three or four days, actually five or six days, we're going to assemble Mr. Dextre on the various spacewalks and that's a pretty involved process." Here is an updated timeline of today's activity (in EDT and mission elapsed time; includes revision B of the NASA television schedule): EDT........DD...HH...MM...EVENT 03/12/08 03:58 PM...01...13...30...STS crew wakeup 04:28 PM...01...14...00...ISS crew wakeup 05:00 PM...01...14...32...Post-MMT briefing on NASA TV 05:08 PM...01...14...40...Group B computer powerup 05:18 PM...01...14...50...ISS daily planning conference 05:28 PM...01...15...00...Rendezvous timeline begins 06:11 PM...01...15...43...NH rendezvous rocket firing 07:10 PM...01...16...42...NC-4 rendezvous rocket firing 07:58 PM...01...17...30...Spacesuits removed from airlock 08:42 PM...01...18...14...TI burn 09:18 PM...01...18...50...Service module lights on 09:18 PM...01...18...50...Sunset 09:23 PM...01...18...55...ISS crew meal 09:28 PM...01...19...00...Hand-held laser ops 09:41 PM...01...19...13...Range: 10,000 feet 09:49 PM...01...19...21...Range: 5,000 feet 09:53 PM...01...19...25...Approach timeline begins 09:54 PM...01...19...26...Sunrise 09:55 PM...01...19...27...Range: 3,000 feet 09:59 PM...01...19...31...MC-4 rendezvous burn 10:03 PM...01...19...35...Range: 1,500 feet 10:05 PM...01...19...37...U.S. solar arrays feathered 10:08 PM...01...19...40...Range: 1,000 feet 10:11 PM...01...19...43...KU antenna to low power 10:12 PM...01...19...44...+R bar arrival directly below ISS 10:17 PM...01...19...49...Range: 600 feet 10:22 PM...01...19...54...Noon 10:24 PM...01...19...56...RPM start window open 10:24 PM...01...19...56...Start pitch maneuver 10:30 PM...01...20...02...RPM full photo window close 10:32 PM...01...20...04...End pitch maneuver 10:34 PM...01...20...06...Initiate pitch up maneuver (575 ft) 10:38 PM...01...20...10...RPM start window close 10:42 PM...01...20...14...Russian arrays feathered 10:46 PM...01...20...18...+V bar arrival 310 feet directly in front of ISS 10:47 PM...01...20...19...Range: 300 feet 10:49 PM...01...20...21...Sunset 10:51 PM...01...20...23...Range: 250 feet 10:55 PM...01...20...27...Range: 200 feet 10:58 PM...01...20...30...Range: 170 feet 10:59 PM...01...20...31...Range: 150 feet 11:03 PM...01...20...35...Range: 100 feet 11:06 PM...01...20...38...Range: 75 feet 11:11 PM...01...20...43...Range: 50 feet 11:14 PM...01...20...46...Range: 30 feet; start stationkeeping 11:19 PM...01...20...51...End stationkeeping; push to dock 11:23 PM...01...20...55...Range: 10 feet 11:25 PM...01...20...57...Sunrise 11:25 PM...01...20...57...DOCKING 11:48 PM...01...21...20...Leak checks 03/13/08 12:08 AM...01...21...40...Docking video playback 12:18 AM...01...21...50...Orbiter docking system prepped for ingress 12:18 AM...01...21...50...Group B computer powerdown 12:33 AM...01...22...05...Post docking laptop reconfig 12:38 AM...01...22...10...Hatch open 01:08 AM...01...22...40...Welcome aboard! 01:13 AM...01...22...45...Safety briefing 01:38 AM...01...23...10...Post-docking EVA transfer 01:38 AM...01...23...10...Soyuz seatliner transfer to ISS 01:38 AM...01...23...10...SRMS grapples SLP 02:00 AM...01...23...32...Mission status briefing on NASA TV 02:28 AM...02...00...00...SLP unberth and install 02:28 AM...02...00...00...Soyuz seatliner installation 02:53 AM...02...00...25...REBA checkout 03:08 AM...02...00...40...Airlock preps 03:18 AM...02...00...50...Transfer ops (JLP and VOK) 03:33 AM...02...01...05...SLP ungrapple 04:28 AM...02...02...00...EVA-1: Procedures review 06:43 AM...02...04...15...EVA-1: Mask pre-breathe 07:38 AM...02...05...10...EVA-1: Airlock 10.2 psi depress 07:58 AM...02...05...30...ISS crew sleep begins 08:28 AM...02...06...00...STS crew sleep begins 09:00 AM...02...06...32...Daily video highlights reel on NASA TV 01:00 PM...02...10...32...Flight director update on NASA TV 04:28 PM...02...14...00...Crew wakeup
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VIDEO:
NARRATED ANIMATION OF PREVIEWING THE DOCKING 