HOUSTON--the shuttle Discovery glided to a picture-perfect docking with the international space station on Saturday, the 13th and final space veteran linkup with the orbital outpost.
With Commander Steven Lindsey manually flying discovery from the aft flight deck, the shuttle's payload bay docking committed his counterpart at the front end of the station's Harmony module at 1: 14 PM CST.
An astronaut "station and Houston, discovery has confirmed catch" communicated by radio.
The shuttle Discovery docked to bring forward the international space station.(Credit: NASA TV)
The historical link marked the first time in the history of 12 years of probe station from United States, Russia, the European Space Agency and Japan were docked at the outpost at the same time.
Later in the mission, if all goes well and mission managers agree, three members of the crew of the station will undock in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to photograph the laboratory complex and all vehicles visiting from afar, capture a single moment that, with the shuttle's imminent withdrawal, never repeated.
But first, combined crews must complete the primary objectives of the mission Discovery, including a final U.S. module loaded with critical supplies and equipment, and an external storage platform carrying a spare set of radiant.
With the shuttle and station linked with all vehicles visit linked combo, the shuttle-station masses around 1.2 million pounds. It took more time than usual to relative motion between the two probes to humidity, allowing the coupling mechanism securely locks the shuttle in place, but was not immediately clear whether this was due to the mass of vehicles or some other factor.
Station commander Scott Kelly (Center, in front of the camera) watch as the crew of the shuttle Discovery enters the space station.(Credit: NASA TV)
About 45 minutes later than expected, has opened a final dash between discovery and the train station at 3: 16 and 20 minutes, after that, comandante Scott Kelly 26 Expedition, together with Alexander Kaleri, Oleg Skripochka, Catherine Coleman, Dmitry Kondratyev and Paolo Nespoli welcomed Lindsey and his fellow shuttle-Eric Boe, Drew, Stephen Bowen, Michael Barratt and Nicole Stott--in the space station.
After a mandatory safety briefing, the flight plan called for Shuttle astronauts to push ahead with the work to transfer the space suits and other station equipment.
Barratt and Stott, operating the station's robot arm, planned to extract a loading ramp in the hold of the discovery. The pallet, known as external logistics carrier 4, is loaded with a spare set of radiant panels for cooling station ammonia.
ELC-4 will be mounted on the underside of the truss solar energy on the right side of the station. To get there, Barratt and will hand out the Stott arm of the shuttle's robot, operated by Buoys and Drew.
The station will be repositioned, inchworm fashion, moving from the Harmony of its mobile workstations. When the move is complete, the Shuttle arm will hand back to ELC-4 and pallet station arm is mounted on truss solar energy for later use as needed.
Because it took longer than expected to complete the actual anchor, the attachment of the pallet load can be postponed to Sunday.
The shuttle Discovery performs a backflip maneuver during the approach to the international space station, allowing the crew to workshop photographing its heat shield.(Credit: NASA TV)
Lindsey and Boe began the terminal stage of appointment at 10: 33 with a rocket firing to begin closing final 9.2 miles to the station.
Shortly after 1: 00 pm. with the shuttle poised 600 foot directly under the laboratory complex, Lindsey guided discovery through a backflip over end-to-end procedures-but-still-spectacular, allowing the ISS crew to photograph the orbiter's heat shield.
Using the Russian Zvezda command module, Coleman and Nespoli photographed Discovery's heat shield using 400 mm and 800 mm telephoto lenses, respectively, as the orbiter flipped over. The images will be sharp analysts in mission control at the Johnson Space Center here for a detailed assessment.
During the discovery launch on Thursday, several pieces of foam insulation fell away from the ship's external tank, including some that appeared to contact the shuttle's heat shield. The spreading of foam during and after the first 2 minutes and 15 seconds of flight dense lower atmosphere can cause debris hit with higher relative speed.
Engineers do not think the foam loss Thursday caused significant damage, and nothing out of the ordinary may be seen in television views of manoeuvre. But the images taken by Coleman and Nespoli will be carefully analyzed to make sure.
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