Discovery Astronauts Dive Into Training

NASA is wrapping up preparations to roll the orbiter Discovery out of its processing hangar while astronauts in Houston get ready to deliver and install the final segment of the International Space Station's lengthy central truss.

Now in Bay No. 3 of the Orbiter Processing Facility, NASA's shuttle fleet leader is scheduled move Jan. 7 to the Kennedy Space Center Vehicle Assembly Building and then roll out to launch pad 39A a week later.

The shuttle and its crew of seven astronauts remain scheduled to blast off Feb. 12 on a mission to haul up the S-6 segment of the station's intergrated truss, which includes the fourth and final set of massive American solar wings. The golden arrays will stretch 240 feet from tip to tip -- once they are roll out in orbit like giant venetian blinds.

Discovery mission specialists Joseph Acaba and Richard Arnold are in the Neutral Bouyancy laboratory at the Sonny Carter Training Facility near the Johnson Space Center, practicing one of the spacewalks they will carry out on the STS-119 mission.

The third of four spacewalks planned for the mission will involve relocate a rail cart that astronauts use to move along the 11-segment truss, which will match the length of an American football field once the S-6 truss caps its starboard end.

The astronauts also will work around a two-armed Canadian robot dubbed Dextre, and they will remove and replace a faulty Remote Power Control Module, which essentially is a big circuit breaker on the girder-like truss.

STS-119 will be NASA's 125th shuttle mission, the 36th flight of Discovery and the 100th mission since the 1986 Challenger accident. It will be the 12th post-Columbia mission and the first of eight missions remaining in NASA's station assembly sequence.

The crew will be headed up by Lee Archambault and it also includes pilot Dominic Antonelli and mission specialists Steven Swanson, John Phillips and Koichi Wakata, who will be the first Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut to serve a lengthy tour of duty on the station.

Wakata will replace current station flight engineer Sandra Magnus, who will return to Earth aboard Discovery. The orbiter is expected to tally 5.7-million miles during 217 orbits of Earth.

The mission also will be the first of six planned for launch in 2009 -- the highest flight rate for the shuttle program since the 2003 Columbia accident.

The flights include five outpost assembly missions and a fifth and final Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission.

ABOUT THE IMAGE: Click to enlarge and save the NASA TV screen grab. It's either Joseph Acaba or Richard Arnold training today in the Neutral Bouyancy Laboratory near NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.