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Leonardo module leaves station after day-long wait
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: April 15, 2010


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The Leonardo cargo module was detached from the International Space Station late Thursday after a lengthy delay due to problems with a berthing mechanism controller.

Because the move came late in the crew's day, the module, attached to the station's robot arm, was parked overnight in a "low hover" position just above the shuttle's payload bay. The astronauts plan to complete the installation early Friday, after enjoying an extra hour of sleep.


Credit: NASA
 
The Italian-built cargo module's main hatch was closed at 3:38 a.m. EDT Thursday and the astronauts installed four common berthing mechanism controller assemblies, the electrical devices that route computer commands to 16 motor-driven bolts and latches holding the module in place.

But the crew reported problems with an electrical connector and telemetry indicated trouble with one of the four controller assemblies. Work to prepare the vestibule between Leonardo and its docking port for depressurization was put on hold while ground controllers scrambled to figure out what was wrong.

"We had problems with the common berthing mechanism on the space station," said John McCullough, chief of the flight director's office at the Johnson Space Center. "This is the controller that drives the bolts that holds the MPLM (cargo module) on the station.

"We had a connector that was not fully aligned as it should be and had a sheared set pin on it. And so the crew taped that down with some Kapton tape that folks went off and looked at and made sure was going to be OK for the duration that port was going to be exposed to space. We checked out the mechanism again, we power cycled everything and brought it back up and everything worked very well."

He said flight controller proceeded slowly because "we wanted to make sure we were very comfortable pressing ahead."

"We actually de-mated some connectors, looked at some of the welded areas and made sure everything was in good shape," he said. "And indeed it was, and when we re-activated it, it worked very well. They went through the depress of the vestibule between the module that's coming off and the station to allow us to have a clean demate and that went very well as well."

The crew grappled the module with the station's robot arm just before 1:30 p.m. and unbolted it from the Harmony module's Earth-facing hatch three hours later.

After the module is locked in Discovery's cargo bay early Friday, the astronauts will press ahead with a final heat-shield inspection, using an inspection boom on the end of the shuttle's robot arm to examine the shuttle's carbon composite nose cap and wing leading edge panels.

Late inspections normally are carried out after a shuttle undocks from the station, using the orbiter's Ku-band antenna system to relay laser scan data to the ground. But Discovery's Ku-antenna system failed earlier in the mission, forcing NASA to implement a docked inspection instead, using the station's Ku-band communications system to downlink the data.

If all goes well, Discovery will undock from the space station around 8:52 a.m. Saturday and land back at the Kennedy Space Center at 8:48 a.m. Monday.

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