NASA reporting a bit of damage to Atlantis; docking complete to ISS

by William Atkins

Sunday, 10 February 2008

After a five-hour inspection by the STS-122 astronauts of the belly of the space shuttle Atlantis on Friday, it was given an almost clean bill of health. Docking of the orbiter to the International Space Station was completed at about 11:17 a.m. CST.

The three small pieces of foam seen coming off of the external tank, did not cause any serious damage to the orbiter. To backup Friday’s inspection, the shuttle crew will do a 360 degree back-flip (rendezvous pitch maneuver) as the orbiter closes in on the International Space Station (ISS).

The shuttle was scheduled to dock with the station on Saturday, February 9, 2008 (flight day three) at about 12:25 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 11:25 a.m. Central Standard Time, the time inside NASA’s Mission Control Center at the Johnson Space Center (JSC), located just outside of Houston, Texas, in the suburb of Clear Lake City.

When the shuttle is approaching the station, the ISS three-member crew will be watching and photographing the orbiter for any signs of damage. This inspection will lend further evidence to the earlier inspection, which used the orbiter boom sensor system (OBSS) on the end of the Canadian robotic arm, that only minor damage was inflicted to the orbiter.

The flight so far, as reported earlier, was just about perfect. John Shannon, NASA deputy shuttle program manager earlier said, “The vehicle could not be performing better. I have never walked up into the engineering room that tracks every little problem that we have on the vehicle and seen a completely blank board. I mean, it is completely blank." [Florida Today: “Ding-free Atlantis closes in on station”

However, since that time, NASA has announced that a bit of damage possibly occurred on the starboard (right-side) Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) pod. A part of the thermal blanket covering the pod was seen sticking out.

In addition, a small area on a tile near the forward reaction control system (FRCS) was seen to be slightly damaged.

The shuttle/station crew will inspect and photograph these areas during the mission. Both of these areas, at this time, does not appear to be major problems but will be investigated further by the STS-122 mission team at the Johnson Space Center.

Rendezvous operations of Atlantis began at about 5:30 a.m. CST on Saturday in preparation for its docking. The commander and pilot of Atlantis made their “TI” burn at about 6:37 a.m. CST, sixteen hours, fifty-two minutes into the mission. The terminal initiation (TI) burn is one of a series of maneuvers that the crew makes in order to position the shuttle just below and behind the space station.

At about this time, the orbiter’s rendezvous radar system (using Ku-band radar) is started to provide navigation data to the orbiter with respect to its relative position away from the space station.

The rendezvous pitch maneuver follows shortly behind the TI maneuver. At about 10:24 a.m. CST the maneuver was begun. Images of the underside of the orbiter are now being taken by the ISS crew members.

Four hundred (400) and 800 millimeter camera lenses are being used by the ISS crew to photograph the orbiter’s belly for about ninety seconds. The images collected today will be downlinked to the JSC’s Mission Control Center with its Ku-band communications system for further analysis by NASA personnel.

The space station crew is also photographing the right OMS pods in order to produce images of any abnormalities to its surface.

At about 10:38 CST, shuttle commander Steve Frisk is now manually moving Atlantis ahead of the space station for its final preparations to dock with the ISS. The orbiter is now on the station’s V-bar (velocity-vector)—about 299 feet in front of the station.

The Capcom at Mission Control in Houston gave the “GO” for docking at about 10:49 a.m. CST.

At 10:53 a.m. CST, the shuttle is approaching the station at about two-tenths a foot per second.

At 11:02, the shuttle is reported by the Capcom (capsule communicator) to be “100 feet and closing.”

At 11:13, the shuttle is about 25 feet out from the Harmony module, the first time that a shuttle will have docked to this recently installed module.

At 11:16, it is within seven feet and approaching at one-tenth a foot per second.

NASA has confirmed that the shuttle docked at 11:17 a.m. with the space station. The latching process of the two vehicles is now being performed.

Leak checks will be performed over the next hour before the hatch is opened allowing the shuttle astronauts to enter the space station.

The next big job for the astronauts will be the installation of the ESA Columbus scientific laboratory, which is currently in the cargo hold of Atlantis.
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