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A European science laboratory to be launched to the International Space Station during a shuttle mission next year is scheduled to arrive at Kennedy Space Center later today.
Named Columbus after the explorer who discovered the New World, the large lab is being ferried to the three-mile KSC shuttle runway aboard a giant Beluga aircraft, a European super transporter designed to carry huge cargoes.
The Beluga departed Bremen, Germany, on Sunday and then flew to Frankfort, Iceland and Newfoundland. The aircraft is tentatively scheduled to arrive at NASA's coastal Florida spaceport around 4 p.m.
Set for launch in late 2007, the cylindrical module will be offloaded from the Beluga Wednesday and then transported to the Space Station Processing Facility in the KSC Industrial Area.
The lab is designed to house up 10 experiment racks the size of telephone booths and is considered the European Space Agency's prime contribution to the International Space Station project.
Click to enlarge the ESA photo of the shell of the Columbus lab being delivered to Bremen in 2001.
An ESA fact sheet on the Columbus lab is here: columbusfactsheet.pdf
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