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Discovery docked at ISS

Space shuttle Discovery is successfully docked at the ISS Thursday at 1118 GMT after a flawless rendezvous. Discovery and the space station were flying over the Pacific Ocean, just west of Chile, during their orbital meeting.

Discovery’s ISS docking marked the first shuttle arrival at the station since Nov. 25, 2002, when Endeavour docked at the orbital facility during NASA’s STS-113 mission.

The STS-114 crew will spend about eight days at the ISS, transferring thousands of pounds of fresh food, equipment and spare parts for the station’s crew. Discovery astronauts will perform three spacewalks outside the station before casting off from the orbital platform and return home on Aug. 7.

While a feat of orbital acrobatics, the backflip – known as the Rendezvous Pitch Maneuver (RPM) – was pivotal highlight of Discovery’s flight. During the maneuver, Discovery Commander Collins slowly flipped Discovery in a circle to give the Expedition 11 crew a clear view of the heat-resistant tiles lining its underside.

ISS crew Krikalev and Phillips had about 1 minute and 40 seconds – a bit longer than the 93 seconds they trained for – to take a carefully rehearsed set of photographs to record the state of Discovery’s belly tiles, which protect the orbiter from the searing heat of reentry during landings.

According to their photography plan, Phillips took about nine images with a 400 mm digital camera to gather a wide-view look at Discovery’s belly tiles. Krikalev, using the equivalent of an 800 mm camera to gather close-up images of Discovery’s landing gear door seals with an analytical resolution of about one inch, NASA officials said.

"I thought the process went really fine," Phillips said after the photography session. "Neither of us saw anything really alarming."

Two primary areas of interest for the engineers that will review the images are a chipped tile near Discovery’s nose landing gear doors, and an "area of interest" further back on the orbiter’s belly, NASA deputy shuttle program manager Wayne Hale said Wednesday.

posted by: kyawoo at 19:26 | link | comments |
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