SPACE EXPLORATION | Expanding the boundaries of human understanding
27 March 2008
Shuttle Returns After Delivering Canadian, Japanese Equipment
Upcoming missions will continue station construction, fix Hubble telescope
Washington -- Space shuttle Endeavour rolled down runway 15 at Kennedy Space Center in Florida the evening of March 26, after completing 250 orbits of Earth and a 16-day, 10.4 million-kilometer mission to the International Space Station.
Mission STS-123 began March 11 and delivered the first segment -- the pressurized section of the Japanese experiment logistics module -- of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Kibo laboratory and the Canadian Space Agency’s two-armed robot named Dextre.
“There really isn’t anymore a U.S. human space flight program or a Russian human space flight program,” NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said during a post-landing briefing. “There is a world human space flight program centered around the building and then later the utilization of the International Space Station. We hope when we get that under our belt, this partnership will return to the moon and later go on to Mars. It’s something we’re doing together.”
During five spacewalks, astronauts installed the Japanese facility on top of the space station’s utility hub Harmony, and assembled and installed Dextre, which can be attached to the station’s robotic arm to handle smaller components that spacewalking astronauts usually handle. At the tip of each arm are “hands” consisting of retractable jaws that grip objects.
Dextre can be operated by the crew inside the station or by flight controllers on the ground, and is equipped with lights, video equipment, a stowage platform and three robotic tools.
Other spacewalk tasks included testing techniques and equipment for repairing tiles that make up the shuttle’s thermal protection system, and move the shuttle’s orbiter boom to a temporary place on the station’s main backbone.
JAPAN’S KIBO LAB
The boom was left on the station because Discovery (STS-124), scheduled to launch May 25 with Kibo’s remote manipulator system and its large pressurized module, will not have room in its cargo bay for the module and the boom. It will be returned to Earth on Discovery.
The STS-124 mission is the second of three flights that will launch components to complete JAXA’s Kibo laboratory. The mission will include two spacewalks to install the two components. The lab's logistics module, installed in a temporary location during STS-123, will be attached to the new lab.
“Our Kibo module is special in the sense that we can conduct experiments inside but also outside of the module,” JAXA Vice President Kaoru Mamiya said. “All sorts of experiments are possible and the Kibo was constructed by Japanese but it’s open to international society, especially our partners. The partners can utilize our module inside and outside. So I hope very effective experiments will be conducted on Kibo.”
STS-123 also delivered Expedition 16 and 17 flight engineer Garrett Reisman to the space station and gave European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Léopold Eyharts, who spent nearly seven weeks at the orbital outpost, a ride home.
REPAIRING HUBBLE
After Discovery’s launch in May, space station construction will be suspended for several months while a team of seven astronauts, scheduled to launch on Atlantis’s STS-125 mission August 28, repairs and upgrades the Hubble Space Telescope.
Eighteen years after Discovery first deployed the 2.4-meter telescope into orbit 563 kilometers above Earth, Atlantis will carry the astronauts and a cargo of equipment, tools and new instruments on an 11-day mission -- the fifth and final mission -- to service the orbiting observatory.
"With the new capabilities we expect to have after this shuttle servicing mission,” Alan Stern, associate administrator for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, said during the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January, “I fully expect Hubble's most impressive accomplishments to lie in its future, eclipsing even its well-known past successes."
The shuttle also will carry an IMAX digital-imaging camera to record the historic mission for a film scheduled to be released in 2010.
During the mission’s five spacewalks, astronauts will install two powerful new science instruments, a new set of the gyroscopes that help stabilize the telescope, and batteries and thermal blankets to extend Hubble's operational life until at least 2013.
If all goes well, a degrading fine-guidance sensor unit, one of three aboard Hubble, will be replaced with a refurbished unit to help maintain the telescope's ability to point and focus on astronomical objects throughout the universe.
Astronauts also will attempt the first-ever, on-orbit repair of two instruments -- the space telescope imaging spectrograph (STIS) and the advanced camera for surveys (ACS). The ACS was the most-used instrument on the telescope until its failure in January 2007after five years of operation.
STIS -- the most sophisticated spectrograph ever on Hubble -- took detailed pictures of celestial objects and separated light into its components to diagnose the physical conditions of galaxies, stars, planets and nebulae.
The final mission of 2008 will be Discovery’s STS-119 mission on December 4 to carry the fourth starboard truss segment and the fourth set of solar arrays and batteries to the space station.
More information about STS-123 and the Hubble Space Telescope is available on the NASA Web site.
