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The orbiter Endeavour is rolling over this morning from its processing hangar at Kennedy Space Center to the Vehicle Assembly Building, where it will be readied for a move next week out to launch pad 39A.
Engineers were called to their stations in the Launch Control Center earlier this morning to support the move to the 52-story assembly building. First motion in the processing hangar came at about 7:36 a.m. EST.
Endeavour is scheduled to launch March 11 on a mission to deliver a two-armed Canadian robot and the first section of the Japanese Kibo science research facility to the International Space Station. Dubbed Dexter, the robot will be stationed outside the outpost and will take on maintenance tasks that otherwise would require astronauts to perform inherently danger spacewalks to get the jobs done.
The Japanese Experiment Logistics Module already has been loaded into a transport canister in the Space Station Processing Facility in the KSC Industrial Area:
The Canadian Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator is to be loaded into the can before the transporter is transferred to the launch pad later this week.
Once in the assembly building, Endeavour will be hoisted atop a mobile launcher platform and then connected to an external tank with attached solid rocket boosters. The fully assembled shuttle is scheduled to be moved to the launch pad a week from today.
Veteran astronaut Dom Gorie will lead a crew of seven on the mission. The crew also includes pilot Gregory H. Johnson and mission specialists Richard Linnehan, Robert Behnken, Michael Foreman, Garrett Reisman and Takao Doi of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Reisman is being ferried up to the station for a long-duration mission. He'll replace European Space Agency astronaut Leopold Eyharts, who arrived at the outpost with Atlantis on Saturday. Eyharts will return to Earth on Endeavour.
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