It's About To Get Crowded Up There...
Hugs and cheers all around this morning aboard the International
Space Station... as the crew of the shuttle Atlantis bade their
compatriots farewell, shortly before the orbiter undocked from the
station.
Following a much-deserved crew "rest day" Saturday, Atlantis
undocked from the International Space Station at 8:50 am EDT Sunday
morning, ending STS-115's successful mission to resume construction
of the orbiting station, and setting the stage for future assembly
missions.
Atlantis delivered the P3/P4 integrated truss to the station.
The STS-115 and Expedition 13 crews used the shuttle and station
robotic arms to attach the truss to the orbital outpost. Then,
STS-115 astronauts conducted three spacewalks in four days to
prepare the truss and its solar arrays for operation.
The hatches between the station and Space Shuttle Atlantis
closed at 6:27 am EDT.
After Atlantis undocked, Pilot Chris Ferguson performed a
360-degree fly-around of the station -- to allow his crewmates to
collect imagery of the newly-expanded station.
Atlantis is scheduled to touch down at 5:57 am EDT Wednesday at
the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, FL. As for
the Expedition 13 crew, they won't be lonely for long.
As Aero-News reported, a
Soyuz TMA is scheduled to liftoff early Monday morning, on a
mission to rendezvous with the station. Onboard will be Expedition
14 crewmembers Mikhail Tyurin and astronaut Michael
Lopez-Alegria... as well as "space tourist" Anousheh Ansari. The
three are scheduled to dock at the ISS at 1:24 am EDT Wednesday
morning.
Most People Ever In Orbit?
An ANN reader sent in a rather intriguing question Saturday
evening (always a great time to ask ANN staffers tough questions --
grin): come Monday, with Discovery in orbit... Expedition 14 on its
way to the ISS... and the crew presently aboard the station... will
that mark the most humans (12) to ever be in space at one time?
Alas, the answer is no... but the record won't be missed by
much. According to Wikipedia -- and verified by NASA and the
Russian Space Agency -- STS-82 (Discovery) blasted off February 11,
1997 with a crew of seven onboard, for a service mission to the
Hubble Space Telescope. At the same time, a total of four Russian
cosmonauts, one French astronaut and one German astronaut were
either onboard the Mir station, or en route to it.
Discovery blasted off one day after TMA-25 was sent into orbit,
with three onboard, to rendezvous with Mir; the three persons
comprising the TMA-24 crew had been onboard the station since
August 1996.
Hence, for 10 days -- from February 11 thru February 21, when
Discovery landed -- there were 13 humans in orbit. That's a heady
achievement, to be sure... but what excites the staff of ANN the
most, is that with the 2010 completion of the ISS, the planned
missions of NASA's next-generation Orion space vehicle, and lest we
forget, private spaceflight on the horizon... is the strong
possibility the present record won't stand for very much
longer.
In fact, it looks like it's about to get a LOT more crowded up
there.