STS-123 MCC Status
Report #14
(17 March 2008) The International
Space Station's newest robot is just one spacewalk away from being fully
assembled.
The space shuttle Endeavour's crewmembers received
their wakeup call at 1:31 p.m. CDT. Their wakeup song for the day was "Sharing
the World," a song written by Pilot Gregory H. Johnson's
brother.
Mission Specialists Rick Linnehan and Robert L. Behnken will
spend the day outside the station, performing the mission's third spacewalk.
During this spacewalk, the spacewalkers will be finishing up the assembly of
Dextre, the Canadian Space Agency's Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator.
They'll add a tool holster, a stowage platform and a camera system to the
robot, and then remove thermal covers that have been protecting the robot's
system during its assembly.
The spacewalkers will also get the Spacelab
Logistics Pallet on which the robot was assembled ready for return to Earth in
the shuttle's cargo bay, and install some spare equipment - a yaw joint for the
station's robotic arm, Canadarm2, and two spare direct current switching units
- on the station's exterior for future use.
Before heading back into the
station, Behnken will also install on the station's exterior Materials
International Space Station Experiment 6A and 6B. MISSE 6 is a science
experiment that will gather data on how materials and coatings are affected by
the extreme environment of space. It's scheduled to stay outside the station
for about six months.
The spacewalk is scheduled to start at 6:23 p.m.
and should last about six and a half hours.
The next STS-123 status
report will be issued near the end of the crew's day at about 5:30 a.m.
Tuesday, or earlier if events warrant.
(source: NASA)
|
||||||||||||
