Live in Orbit: Station Gets Boost

Endeavour commander Chris Ferguson and pilot Eric Boe have completed a 30-minute "reboost" maneuver, using shuttle thrusters to nudge the station's altitude roughly a mile.

That puts the station in better position to dock with a Russian Progress cargo vehicle in a little over a week.

"We saw a good reboost," flight communicator Terry Virts said from NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston. "Good work there."

The Progress is shown at left in processing at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It is scheduled to launch from there Wednesday and to dock with the station Nov. 30.

Endeavour is scheduled to depart the station on Thanksgiving after a 12-day stay.

Elsewhere, officials are still mulling over how to resume activation of a new urine processing system, which eventually will recycle urine into drinking water.

Despite some difficulty doing that, Expedition 18 flight engineer Sandra Magnus is continuing to hook up an apparatus that will provide on board tests of water quality.

It's called the Total Organic Carbon Analyzer, or TOCA, and is shown at left.