A Russian Soyuz lifeboat was relocated at the International Space Station today, clearing the way for a Russian docking compartment that will be hauled up to the outpost aboard shuttle Atlantis.Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov, U.S. astronaut T.J. Creamer and Soichi Noguchi of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency climbed aboard their Soyuz spacecraft at the station around 6 a.m. and then went through a series of leak checks before undocking from the nadir, of Earth-facing, port of the Russian Zarya module.
With Kotov at the controls, the spacecraft then flew around to a docking port at the back-end of the Russian Zvezda Service Module.
The move opened up Zarya's nadir port for the installation of the Russian Rassvet Mini Research Module on the fifth day of Atlantis' flight to the station. The station assembly and outfitting mission is scheduled for launch Friday here at Kennedy Space Center.
The Rassvet module will serve as a fourth docking port Soyuz crew transport vehicles and robotic Progress space freighters. Attached to it is an airlock that will be used in a new Russian laboratory set for launch in 2012.
Rassviet means "dawn" in Russian. It is one of two Mini-Research modules launch in the last nine months. A third docking compartment, the Pirs module, was launched in 2001.
3 comments:
I wonder why TMA-17 wasn't parked there when it arrived, rather than moving it today.
Good question, Conor. The port the Soyuz moved to was just recently vacated by a departing Progress cargo vehicle.
If there is ever an emergency, I wonder how much Russia will charge NASA for each astronaut saved. If you don't think that will happen, think again. Once we are 100% dependant on Russia for sending American astronauts to and from space, we're going to learn exactly what they're all about, and it's not going to be pretty.
We STILL have a chance to correct this enormous mistake, but time is running out!
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