SPACE SHUTTLE Mission Archive 2009 

For the mission patch of STS-129, the sun shines brightly on the International Space Station above and the United States below representing the bright future of U.S. human spaceflight. Image: NASA

Attired in training versions of their shuttle launch and entry suits, these six astronauts take a break from training to pose for the STS-129 crew portrait. Image: NASA

NASA isn’t nearly done investing in the station, however, and the agenda of Atlantis’ crew makes that clear. In addition to the complex robotics work required to get the spares into place, there are three spacewalks scheduled to go on outside and a complicated rewiring project planned for the crew inside.

The focus for the work inside, and object of several tasks inside, will be preparing for the STS-130 mission, during which the last U.S. space station module will be delivered: the Tranquility node with its attached cupola. During the spacewalks, that will mean routing connections and preparing the berthing port on the Harmony node that it will attach to. On the inside, the work is a little more extensive. Originally, Tranquility was to be installed on the Earth-facing port of the Harmony node, but it’s since been decided that it would fit better on the port side of Harmony. And changing the plans requires significant changes to the hardware. Data, power, cooling lines, air flow – all of those connections need to be rerouted to the new location, and with double the manpower normally available at the station, a shuttle mission is a good time to get that done.

However, even with the shuttle crew at the station, resources aren’t unlimited. Any mission would consider its plate pretty full, with the robotics work required to get the spares transferred to the station, the spacewalks and the Tranquility prep work inside. But unlike the other space shuttles, Atlantis wasn’t outfitted with the system that allows shuttles to draw power from the space station. That means that where recent station assembly missions have lasted up to 17 days, Atlantis has only 11 to get to the station and back.

“All that in 11 days,” Sarafin said. “It’s a lot to package into a finite period of time; it’s a challenging mission.”

Still, the STS-129 team intends to make the most of every second it has on orbit, just as the larger shuttle and station teams will make the most of each of the remaining missions. That’s not unusual, though – Atlantis’ Commander Charles O. Hobaugh would say that it’s characteristic of the entire effort that has gone into building the station.

“There’s been a lot of work put forth to make it all successful, and it’s just incredible to see how much has been accomplished and how successful it has become,” he said. “The space station has been a long hard road, but it’s been an extremely productive road. We’ve really been able to bring together a diverse national and international background of cultures for one common cause. It’s all science and exploration and cooperation.” A listing of NASA astronauts, Russian cosmonauts and International partners. The biographies are all accessed through NASA. We endeavour to keep them as up to date as possible.

 

 

 

STS-128: More Science

 

08.21.09

The STS-128 patch symbolizes the 17A mission and represents the hardware, people and partner nations that contribute to the flight. Image: NASA

The International Space Station now has the people (six astronauts from four countries), the place (three laboratories, 220 miles up) and the time (24/7) for science. The STS-128 mission is going to provide it with more science to do.

With the previous mission, the Japanese Kibo laboratory complex was completed and two experiments installed on its new porch. With the United States’ Destiny laboratory, the European Space Agency’s Columbus laboratory, and the projects attached to the station’s exterior, there are now 20 research facilities inside the space station and eight experiments going on outside.

But there’s still room for more. When space shuttle Discovery next visits the space station, it will be bringing more equipment for the astronauts to put to use inside those laboratories, as well as other equipment to help the station keep up with the increased demand for air and exercise that came with its increase in crew size earlier this year.

“Now that we went to the six-person crew and only have seven more shuttle flights, our main aim for the shuttle program is station utilization,” said Tony Ceccacci, the mission’s lead space shuttle flight director. “Since we are down to our last few shuttle flights, it is critical to maximize our ‘up mass’ capability to ensure we get all the required equipment and hardware to support continued station operations.”

To accomplish that, Discovery will be carrying the Leonardo Multi-Purpose Logistics Module. A sort of moving trailer for spaceships, the logistics module provides the shuttle a way to get all the items that belong on the inside of the station but don’t fit inside the space shuttle’s cabin into space. In this case, that’s about 15,200 pounds worth of cargo.

A lot of that’s just basic necessities – clothes, computer hardware, first aid supplies. But mixed in with it are two racks of equipment that will provide the crew with more ways to do its real daily work: science.

First, there’s the Materials Science Research Rack 1. As the name would suggest, it’s to be used for the study of materials; metals, glasses, crystals, ceramics and more will be mixed, melted, solidified and (in the case of crystals) grown in the rack to allow scientists on the ground to gather more data about how the processes work without the interference of gravity.

Attired in training versions of their shuttle launch and entry suits, these seven astronauts take a break from training to pose for the STS-128 crew portrait. Image: NASA

If it’s not covered by the materials rack, there’s a fair chance it will be by the new Fluids Integrated Rack being delivered inside the logistics module. Colloids, gels, bubbles, boiling and cooling are just a few of the long list of areas astronauts will study.

And of course, with all the additional science being done on the station, the crews will need more room in which to store the fruits of their labor. So Discovery also will bring up a second Minus Eighty Laboratory Freezer for ISS – or MELFI, as it’s known.

But there’s also the science of living in space to consider, which is where the other equipment being brought up comes in: a new treadmill, a new crew quarters compartment and a new air revitalization system.

The importance of the latter should be pretty obvious. The air revitalization system removes from the air the carbon dioxide the crew is constantly breathing out, making up for the lack of trees in space. The crew doesn’t have to do anything more than breathe (and perform occasional maintenance) to participate in that experiment, but the experience gained on the ground in its development and the opportunity to prove that the concept work outside the Earth’s atmosphere is invaluable.

The same goes for the treadmill. It’s essential that all six crew members at the space station are able to get the exercise they need to prevent the bone and muscle loss that occurs when you don’t have gravity weighing you down. And having a space of your own – to sleep in and store personal items – may seem like a small thing, but psychologically it makes a big difference.

All of these elements and the others that go into living in space, according to the STS-128 Commander Rick Sturckow, are what NASA will build on as it moves into the next phase of space exploration.

“My hope is people will look back and say we really learned a lot from building and operating the space station, and we could have never done what we’re going to do in the future if we hadn’t had the space station program,” Sturckow said. “They’ll look back, and it probably won’t be the same exact hardware, but we certainly learned a bunch of lessons from the hardware that we are living with every day in space.”

The mission insignia for STS-127 - the 32nd construction flight of the International Space Station (ISS) and the final of a series of three flights dedicated to the assembly of the Japanese "Kibo" laboratory complex. Image: NASA

Although they will be installing a one-of-a- kind porch in space, the astronauts of space shuttle Endeavour's mission STS-127 won’t have time to sit back and relax. Any way you look at it, STS-127 is a full mission.

For one, it’s scheduled to be 16 days long. That’s not the longest mission a space shuttle has flown, but it’s only the second time that astronauts have gone into a mission planning to stay in space for that long.

“The first 15 years of flying shuttle, a long mission was a week,” said lead Shuttle Flight Director Paul Dye. “We’d go up and we’d do our task and we’d come on down. Nowadays, we basically are using the shuttle in the final stages of assembly for the space station, the way that shuttle was originally conceived. To me, that’s pretty exciting.”

And with length has come complexity.

“I’ve worked in some capacity in every space station mission since the beginning,” said lead Station Flight Director Holly Ridings. “It’s been amazing. But I was joking the other day that I can remember when the really big, exciting thing we had to do on orbit was turn the heaters on the Z1 truss on and off to make sure we didn’t use too much power.”

Daily life at the station has gotten a bit more complicated since then. The station’s increased in living space alone by 45 percent in the past two years, and the number of astronauts living there will have doubled by the time space shuttle Endeavour arrives at the station. “You start out there, and today you have a complex that’s roughly the size of a five-bedroom house, and you can move up and down the truss on the robotic arm that walks and can move on a railcar,” Ridings said. “And we’ve added all the international partner modules – you’ve got different languages and cultures. We really have come a long way.”

But there’s still a lot to get done at the space station before its main source of supplies and equipment – the space shuttle fleet – retires. And that means the shuttle crew – Commander Mark Polansky, Pilot Doug Hurley and Mission Specialists Christopher Cassidy, Tom Marshburn, Dave Wolf, Julie Payette of the Canadian Space Agency and Tim Kopra, who will be trading places with station Flight Engineer Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) – has a lot on its agenda. For instance, they’re signed up to perform five spacewalks while they’re there; again, that’s not a first, but it’s only the second time that so many have been planned for a station mission.

“That’s spacewalk, a day off, a spacewalk, a day off,” Dye said. “And that just goes on forever.”

Attired in training versions of their shuttle launch and entry suits, the STS-127 astronauts take a break from training to pose for the crew portrait. Image: NASA

Endeavour will arrive with a cargo bay full of work for the crew’s four spacewalkers – orbital replacement units and new batteries for the station’s oldest solar array. And some of their work will be waiting for them on the station’s truss – cargo and payload attachment systems. But the main event will be the installation of the new Japanese hardware.

Meanwhile, inside the shuttle and station, things will be just as busy for the robotic arm operators. All three of the available robotic arms will be put to use, sometimes all on the same day. The shuttle’s Canadarm and the station’s Canadarm2 will be put through their regular paces for surveys, unloading cargo and moving equipment and spacewalkers around, and the new Japanese robotic arm will be making its debut to transfer science experiments – it’s been tested since it arrived on the STS-126 shuttle mission in November 2008. Four spacewalks and a great deal of the robotics work will devote some time to installing and outfitting the final pieces of the JAXA’s Kibo laboratory – its external facility, which will provide the Japanese a way to expose science experiments to the extreme environment of space, an exposed experiment logistics module for storage and some experiments to get it started.

“It’s certainly really exciting for JAXA,” said Polansky. “For them, this is the last of their hardware that’s going to be permanently attached to the space station. This completes their series.”

This mission also steps up the involvement of the Japanese flight controllers on the ground, as it’s the first time they’ll be operating their own mechanism. With the exception of the Zvezda service module, every module on the space station is (or in the case of the Kibo logistics module, was) connected to a U.S. module, so all use the U.S. standard common berthing mechanism to connect. The Kibo external facility will never need to be connected to anything but a Japanese-built module, and so the Japanese were free to use any berthing mechanism they wanted.

“Before, even when we had pieces of hardware that were built by someone else, we have, here in the U.S. control center, still maintained a lot of the technical leadership,” Ridings said. “In this case, they truly have technical leadership for some of the things that must work to make the mission a success. It’s unique.”

In fact, it’s a banner flight for all the international partners, as all five space agencies – the United States, the Russian, the Canadian, the Japanese and the European – will have representatives at the space station when the shuttle arrives, in addition to the six extra Americans and one extra Canadian Endeavour will deliver. Polansky said just having all those nations represented and working together toward common goals is a huge accomplishment.

“I don’t think that, as a global community, we get the credit we should for doing something like that and what it means to set that kind of example,” he said. “Countries that have, historically, had a lot of differences and even today have some tensions, politically – when it comes to the arena of space, we’re somehow insulated from all that. On our level, it’s simply figuring out how to get the job done. And it’s not just a job like you’re constructing some building here on Earth. You’re doing something in an extremely hostile environment.” In fact, Ridings said that not only does everyone work together, but the mix of different perspectives, philosophies and resources actually works to the station’s advantage – not to mention the people who are a part of its operations.

“I think my world view would be very different if I’d not had the opportunity to work at a technical level on this incredible goal with people of different cultures and countries,” she said. “That’s been the best part.”

The mission insignia for STS-125 - the fourth Hubble servicing mission. Image: NASA

It's a mission to once more push the boundaries of how deep in space and far back in time humanity can see. It's a flight to again upgrade what already may be the most significant satellite ever launched.

And, for the space shuttle, it's a final visit to a dear, old friend.

The STS-125 mission will return the space shuttle to the Hubble Space Telescope for one last visit before the shuttle fleet retires in 2010. Over 11 days and five spacewalks, the shuttle Atlantis’ crew will make repairs and upgrades to the telescope, leaving it better than ever and ready for another five years – or more – of research.

The shuttle Discovery launched Hubble in 1990, and released it into an orbit 304 nautical miles above the Earth. Since then it’s circled Earth more than 97,000 times and provided more than 4,000 astronomers access to the stars not possible from inside Earth’s atmosphere. Hubble has helped answer some of science’s key questions and provided images that have awed and inspired the world.

“We’ve actually seen an object that emitted its light about 13 billion years ago,” said Hubble senior scientist Dave Leckrone. “Since the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that’s its infancy, the nursery. From the nearest parts of our solar system to further back in time than anyone has ever looked before, we’ve taken ordinary citizens on a voyage through the universe.”

But Hubble has not done it alone.

Atlantis’ crew – Commander Scott Altman, Pilot Gregory C. Johnson and Mission Specialists Andrew Feustel, Michael Good, John Grunsfeld, Mike Massimino and Megan McArthur – will be the fifth shuttle crew to fly to the telescope. Their predecessors have replaced and repaired failed and faulty components and added new and improved cameras and scientific equipment, and the STS-125 crew will be no different.

In fact, just 17 days before they were originally scheduled to launch to the satellite, one side of the computer that sends commands to Hubble’s science instruments and formats science data for transmission to the ground – called the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling Unit, or SIC&DH – malfunctioned. Mission managers were able to postpone the visit to allow time for a spare unit to be tested and to give the astronauts time to learn to install it, further extending Hubble’s life.

And it will be a more robust life, thanks to the new scientific instruments Atlantis’ spacewalkers will install. The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, for instance, will observe the light put out by extremely faint, far-away quasars and see how that light changes as it passes through the intervening gas between distant galaxies. In this way scientists will learn what that gas is made of, how it’s changed over time and how it affects the galaxies around it.

The Hubble Space Telescope is in the grip of space shuttle Columbia's robotic arm in March 2002 at the beginning of STS-109, the third Hubble servicing mission. Image: NASA

“It’s an important player in the story of how galaxies are formed and how the chemical makeup of the universe has changed over time,” Leckrone said.

And the new Wide Field Camera 3 will allow Hubble to take large-scale, extremely clear and detailed pictures over a very wide range of colors. At ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths the WFC3 represents a dramatic improvement in capability over all previous Hubble cameras. It is also a very capable visible light camera, though by design not quite as capable at visible wavelengths as Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The WFC3 and ACS are designed to work together in a complementary fashion.

“If I want a complete family album of the universe, I need to look at it in all these different wavelengths,” Leckrone said. “This will be the first time we’ve had an opportunity to take all these different images together, to have a comparable quality of pictures across this whole wavelength band.”

Before those much anticipated views are seen, though, the equipment has to be installed – a process that will be exciting in its own right. The spacewalks necessary to outfit Hubble will be very different from the spacewalks conducted at the International Space Station.

“It’s more like brain surgery than construction,” Lead Flight Director Tony Ceccacci said. “On station spacewalks, you’re installing large pieces of equipment – trusses, modules, etc. – and putting it together like an erector set. You can’t do that with Hubble. Hubble spacewalks are comparable to standing at an operating table, doing very dexterous work.”

Although the installation of the new equipment and the replacement of some old items – gyroscopes, batteries and a fine guidance sensor, in addition to the SIC&DH – will be challenging, it’s the repairs the astronauts plan that will be the most complicated.

The new camera and spectrograph are designed to complement the scientific instruments already on the telescope – specifically the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. But pieces of those instruments have failed in past years – not the entire instrument, but specific pieces inside of them. The crew will replace only the pieces that have failed.

But those instruments were never designed to be repaired in space. In fact, they were specifically designed not to come apart.

“When we first looked at it, we were going ‘well, maybe, maybe not,’” Ceccacci said.

The Hubble Space Telescope is seen in March 2002 with its new solar arrays after the completion of STS-109, the third Hubble servicing mission. Image: NASA

Since then, the team has come up with a plan for the work that Ceccacci believes will be very successful. But it won’t be easy – the repair of the spectrograph, for instance, requires the spacewalkers to remove more than 100 screws to access a computer card they will pull out and replace.

Still, the mission’s commander pointed out that it’s good practice for the future.

“I think it’s a step that we need to take to make us better able to go to places like Mars,” Altman said. “You don’t want to drag a whole spare giant box along – you’d like to be able to have the one little transistor you need to plug in when that fails. Being able to demonstrate this in space is a key element of us growing as a space-faring people.”

The Hubble spacewalks won’t be the only things that differ from missions to the space station. Confined to just the shuttle, the quarters will be tighter; with five back-to-back spacewalks, the pace will be faster.

Without the station crew to give the shuttle a once over and photograph its heat shield , the customary survey of the heat shield done the day after launch will be much more intensive. The crew will use the shuttle robotic arm and its 50-foot boom extension and sensor systems to perform not only the standard nose cap and wing leading edges inspection, but also a survey of the upper crew cabin and the entire underside.

In the unlikely event that irreparable damage is found, the crew also won’t be able to get to the space station to wait for a ride home – Atlantis can't reach the station from Hubble’s orbit. Because the crew won't have access to the station and the support it could provide in an emergency, the mission to Hubble requires some changes on the ground.

For every shuttle mission since Columbia, there has been a contingency plan in place to allow another shuttle to be launched if needed to rescue a stranded shuttle crew. On station missions, that stranded crew can wait longer at the station than would be the case for Atlantis. So, for 125, another shuttle will be standing ready on Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-B. If needed, space shuttle Endeavour, manned by the flight deck crew of mission STS-123 which flew in March, will be ready to fly to Hubble and retrieve Atlantis’ crew within days.

What puts Altman’s mind at ease, however, are the changes NASA has made to keep damage from occurring in the first place.

“I feel pretty good that we’ve made incredible improvement in the external tank,” he said. “That’s the root cause. But if something does happen, I think we have the tools to find it, see where it is, evaluate how serious it is and fix it. And then on that one-way-down-at-the-edge-of-the-probability-level chance that you could have damage such that you wouldn’t want to come home on it, we have the capability to stay up there – extend our time and have another shuttle come get us.”

The risks, he believes, are relatively small, and the payoff is huge.

“Hubble puts cutting edge science together with a visual image that grabs the public’s imagination,” Altman said. “I think that’s the first step in exploration. Because Hubble takes light that’s been traveling for billions of years, sucks it in and shows it to us. It’s like taking you on a journey 13 and a half billion light years away while you sit there at home and look out at the universe.”

Attired in training versions of their shuttle launch and entry suits, the STS-119 crew members await the start of a training session in the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility at Johnson Space Center, Houston. Image: NASA

If the International Space Station crew wants to invite three more people to join them in living full time in space, the space shuttle Discovery crew says more power to 'em – literally.

The STS-119 mission will deliver to the station the final set of solar arrays needed to complete the station's complement of electricity-generating solar panels, and through them support the station's expanded crew of six in 2009.

"More crew means that we'll have to run more life support equipment, more crew support equipment – toilet facilities, water processing equipment and all of that stuff," said Kwatsi Alibaruho, the lead space station flight director for the mission. "We'll have to run more of all of that, so we need additional power."

And that's not even counting the science.

Over the past year, one new connecting node – Harmony – and two new international partner laboratories – the European Columbus and the Japanese Kibo – have been added to the space station, expanding its capacity for science experiments. And one of the reasons the crew is being expanded is to have more hands aboard performing those experiments. The additional electricity provided by the new solar arrays will help power those experiments.

The set of solar arrays that the STS-119 crew will be bringing up includes two solar array wings, each of which has two 115-foot-long arrays, for a total wing span of 240 feet, including the equipment that connects the two halves and allows them to twist as they track the sun. Altogether, the four sets of arrays can generate 84 to 120 kilowatts of electricity – enough to provide power for more than 40 average homes. Since the three existing arrays can handle the majority of the station's day-to-day operational and life support needs, the newest solar array will double the amount of power available for scientific research.

"We're able to do a lot of things in our current configuration, and we're not too power limited," Alibaruho said. "But we still have some other things to get on orbit. We don't have the Columbus module and the Kibo module completely full of experiments, the way we expect to have it in coming years. So we need the additional power capability to be able to expand the science capability."

Adding the additional power may prove a bit tricky, however. This will be the fourth truss segment sporting solar array wings to be installed on the station, but only the second that's quite this far out on the station's truss. The segment is called the S6 truss – "S" for starboard, the right side of the station, and "6" for its place at the very end of the starboard truss.

STS-119 Mission Specialist Richard Arnold participates in an Extravehicular Mobility Unit spacesuit fit check in the Space Station Airlock Test Article in the Crew Systems Laboratory at Johnson Space Center. Image: NASA

To install it, the station's robotic arm must extend its reach just about as far as it will go, leaving it with very little room to maneuver. The same was true of its mirror image on the port side of the station – the P6 truss segment – so the crew expects to be able to pull it off without a hitch. But that doesn't mean it will be easy.

"We've done it before, but we haven't done it with these exact same people," Discovery's commander, Lee Archambault, said. "But there are some very good lessons learned out there, and we'll certainly capitalize on those."

With Archambault, Discovery's crew includes Pilot Tony Antonelli and Mission Specialists Richard Arnold, Joseph Acaba, John Phillips, Steve Swanson and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Wakata will stay aboard the station after Discovery docks -- becoming the first JAXA station crew member -- while astronaut Sandy Magnus, who arrived at the station on mission STS-126, will return home.

More lessons learned for Discovery's mission will come, in particular, from previous experience unfolding the solar arrays. When the first set of the station's solar arrays was unfolded during the STS-97 mission, the crew ran into a problem called "stiction" – the plastics and polymers that coat the panels of the solar arrays stuck together. Then later, when those same solar arrays were folded up, moved and redeployed, the wires that guide the panels got snagged, causing one of the arrays to tear.

These arrays aren't likely to ever need to be folded up and moved to a new location, and by the time the second set of arrays was ready for installation, engineers had come up with a way around the stiction problem. So neither of those issues is expected to crop up this time around. Still, lead shuttle flight director Paul Dye said that doesn't mean you can expect it to go smoothly.

"It's always the thing that you think you have down, that's routine, that comes back and bites you," Dye said. "It'll either be routine or it will be heart stopping, like always."

STS-119 Commander Lee Archambault (left) and Pilot Tony Antonelli stand near a NASA DC-9 aircraft prior to a Heavy Aircraft Training session at Ellington Field near Johnson Space Center. Image: NASA

If some new problem does present itself, there should be plenty of time to troubleshoot it. The STS-119 mission includes four spacewalks, but has only one and a quarter spacewalks worth of work that has to be done before the next mission. The first spacewalk will be devoted to installing the new solar arrays, and during the third, the crew will move the CETA – crew and equipment translation aid – carts from the port side of the station's truss to the starboard to clear a path on the port side of the truss that will be needed for STS-127.

Besides that, there are a lot of get-ahead tasks that Discovery's crew will have the opportunity to check off -- everything from deploying cargo attachment systems on the starboard truss to installing a GPS antenna that will help guide the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle to the station later in the year. Those are important tasks, but there's no immediate need for them. So, if necessary, they can be put off until a later flight.

"There's a great potential to have some issues that we may need some additional spacewalking time to go alleviate," Alibaruho said. "This mission is structured in such a way that we could conceivably go address them without necessarily having to extend the mission or add a spacewalk."

One way or another, the crew plans to get the last truss segment and its two solar array wings installed. And at the end of the mission, when the shuttle undocks from the space station, Archambault said he can't wait to get his first look at them during the flyaround, when the two arrays on the port side of the station will for the first time be balanced out by a matching set on the starboard side.

"This will be the first time we get a flyaround with imagery of the space station looking about what it's going to look like in its final configuration," Archambault said. "We've still got to install Kibo's external facility and Node 3 with its cupola further on. But for all intents and purposes, 99 percent of it is going to look just like the plans after we get out of there."