Astronauts get to work
2008-06-03 10:06
Houston - A pair of astronauts from the
visiting shuttle Discovery were preparing for a spacewalk on
Tuesday to begin installation of Japan's Kibo laboratory on the
International Space Station (ISS).
Mission specialists Michael Fossum and Ronald Garan also
will retrieve a laser-studded inspection boom which is usually
used to check the ship's wings and nose cap for damage.
The shuttle had no room for the boom because of the size of
the Japanese lab and so the shuttle on the previous mission in
March left it behind on the station for retrieval by the
Discovery crew, which will take it back to earth.
Instead, the Discovery astronauts used a camera on the end
of the shuttle's 15m robot arm, but they could
not reach the underside of the wings. Further inspections are
planned for latter in this mission.
Damage inspections have been a routine part of shuttle
missions since the 2003 Columbia disaster which was caused by
damage to the shuttle's heat shield during launch.
Fossum and Garan were to spend their sleep period in the
station's Quest airlock to purge their bodies of nitrogen
before the spacewalk, which was scheduled to begin at 15:32 GMT and last roughly 6-1/2 hours.
The giant lab Kibo is the centrepiece of this two-week
international mission and will establish Japan's permanent
place in space.
The Discovery crew floated aboard the ISS on Monday where
they were warmly greeted and embraced by its crew after a
flawless docking and a two-day journey.
But the mission has not been incident-free.
Nasa officials revealed on Monday that bricks and other
debris had come off the flame trench beneath the launchpad at
Cape Canaveral in Florida from which Discovery blasted off on
Saturday. The concrete-fortified trench helps to deflect the
intense heat of shuttle launches.
The debris was strewn around the launch area and while Nasa
managers described the incident as "unprecedented" they said
they were confident it could be repaired in time for October's
shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.
"We'll fix it without any problems before October," deputy
shuttle programme manager LeRoy Cain told reporters at the
Johnson Space Centre in Houston.