Blogger note: Click to enlarge and save the NASA TV screen grab above just because it's cool. It shows (from right to left) a Russian Progress cargo carrier docked to the Russian Pirs airlock; a Russian Soyuz crew transport parked on the nadir side of the Russian Zarya module; the U.S. Quest airlock and the P6 solar wings behind the P3-P4 arrays.
Presidential call on tap at 12:40 p.m. EDT.
Discovery's astronauts are heading into a vital day of orbital homework -- one in which they have to cram for what amounts to a super-important, spur-of-the-moment final exam on Friday: a solar wing repair spacewalk put together on the fly.
Former U.S. President George H. W. Bush, meanwhile, will ring up the joined crews of shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station today during a visit to NASA's storied Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Bush, who served as the nation's 41st president between January 1989 and January 1993 and also was a two-term vice president under former President Ronald Reagan, will phone the astronauts at 12:40 p.m. EDT today.
That done, Discovery missions specialists Scott Parazynski and Douglas Wheelock will go over plans for an excursion aimed at repairing a torn blanket on a U.S. solar wing and permanently restoring 10 percent of U.S. power available to run outpost systems.
The station's rail cart will transport the outpost's 57.5-foot robot out to a work site during the crew's day, and ground controllers will voice up any changes to the priminary timeline for what is expected to be a full, 6.5-hour excursion outside the growing space complex.
You can watch all the prep work live here in The Flame Trench. Simply click the link below the image above to launch our NASA TV viewer and round-the-clock coverage of NASA's 120th shuttle mission, the 23rd devoted to station assembly and maintenance.
The latest NASA TV schedule -- Rev H -- is here: tvsked_revh.pdf.
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