NASA STS-117 Status
Report #16
(16 June 2007) A new spaceflight
endurance record was set this morning as 10 astronauts and cosmonauts slept on
the docked space shuttle Atlantis and the International Space
Station.
At 12:47 a.m. CDT, Astronaut Suni Williams' time in
space since her launch last Dec. 9 reached 188 days and 4 hours, matching the
mark for the longest single spaceflight ever by a woman space traveller. That
mark was set by Astronaut Shannon Lucid on her flight to the Mir space station
in 1996.
The wakeup call featuring the University of Texas at El Paso
Fight Song, performed by the UTEP Pep Band, was played for Mission Specialist
(and UTEP alumnus) John "Danny" Olivas at 7:38 a.m. CDT.
Today the four
spacewalkers will spend time configuring the spacesuits and EVA tools used on
Friday's 7-hour, 58-minute EVA by Olivas and Mission Specialist Jim Reilly, and
then preparing the Quest airlock for Sunday's spacewalk by Mission Specialists
Patrick Forrester and Steven Swanson.
The plan for EVA 4 includes
verification of Drive Lock Assembly 2, one of a pair of mechanisms which will
drive rotation of the S3/S4 Truss Solar Alpha Rotary Joint, and removal of the
final launch restraints on the SARJ to enable its rotation so the solar arrays
on S4 can track the sun. The spacewalkers will also remove a keel pin and drag
link from S3, complete bolting down a piece of debris shielding on the Destiny
laboratory, install a computer network cable on Unity, and remove a Global
Positioning System antenna.
Crewmembers will spend time today
transferring supplies between ISS and Atlantis, and at 5:18 p.m. will review
the timeline for Sunday's spacewalk. At 6:43 p.m. all 10 astronauts and
cosmonauts get together in the Destiny laboratory for the Joint Crew News
Conference.
Mission Control Moscow restarted the Russian computers that
provide backup attitude control and orbital attitude adjustment for the
station's control moment gyroscopes Friday afternoon and confirmed that they
were stable. This morning the Russian flight controllers began sending commands
to restart some systems in the Russian segment of ISS.
The Russian
central computer is now communicating with the U.S. command and control
computer, and the Russian terminal computer is again talking to the U.S.
navigation computers. Additional commanding and systems restarts are
anticipated today as Russian specialists pore over operations data from the two
computers.
The next STS-117 status report will be issued Saturday
evening or earlier if events warrant.
(source: NASA Johnson Space
Center)