On March 11, Endeavour Will Fly First Kibo Mission

please visit 7effects.com

Nine days after Atlantis has landed ending the STS-122 mission, NASA is ready to send another spaces shuttle to the International Space Station.

On Friday, the NASA mission management confirmed the official launch time of the STS-123. On March 11 at 2:28 a.m. EDT, the space shuttle Endeavour will be launched from Kennedy Space Center.

After two days of evaluating launch preparations for the mission, NASA has confirmed the readiness of the shuttle, flight crew and payload.

"We landed (Atlantis) nine days ago, which is just amazing to me," said John Shannon, who replaced N. Wayne Hale, Jr. last week as the shuttle program manager. "The team has turned around and is ready to go."

Speaking about the mission, Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Space Operations said there are very few issues being worked and the shuttle is ready to go. "It was a very thorough review, we covered lots information, lots of data," said Gerstenmaier. "The teams are truly ready."

"It’s a tribute to the teams that they worked so well with the vehicle... they've done a phenomenal job," he added.

Endeavour's crew includes Commander Dominic Gorie, Pilot Gregory Johnson and Mission Specialists Rick Linnehan, Robert Behnken, Mike Foreman and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's, Takao Doi. Endeavour is launching with the expectation of staying in space for 16 days, and there are always extra days set aside in case weather or a technical problem delays landing.

NASA has scheduled five spacewalks for the mission STS-123. During the first three spacewalks, the astronauts will install the first pressurized section, Japanese Experiment Logistics Module (ELM-PS), of the future Kibo (Hope) Japanese module and the Canadian Space Agency’s newest contribution to the station, the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator or Dextre.

The Japanese astronaut, Takao Doi, will be the first person to venture inside the module, which will be installed on the zenith – or upper – side of the Harmony Node.

Kibo’s main facility and its robotic arm are scheduled to launch on the following shuttle mission, and a "front porch" that will allow astronauts to expose experiments directly to space will be delivered later.

Dextre will launch as two arms, two wrist end effectors and a main body attached to a pallet. The crew will take the pallet out of the shuttle’s cargo bay and attach it to the station during the second spacewalk. Linnehan and Reisman will spend the remainder of that spacewalk beginning the Dextre assembly. All of the second spacewalk and part of the third will be devoted to finishing the assembly.

The fourth spacewalk will be used to replace a remote power control module and test a shuttle tile repair material. The repair material test was originally scheduled for Discovery’s mission last October, but was rescheduled so that problems with the station’s solar arrays could be addressed.

The goal is to complete this test before space shuttle Atlantis flies to the Hubble Space Telescope in August. Unlike missions to the space station, Atlantis’ crew members wouldn’t be able to wait on the station for another shuttle to bring them home if Atlantis was damaged.

And on the fifth spacewalk, mission specialists Robert L. Behnken and Mike Foreman will store on the station the boom that attaches to the shuttle’s robotic arm for heat shield inspections. The boom is being stored on orbit since the next shuttle will not have enough room to carry both the boom and the larger JAXA module in the cargo bay.



please visit 7effects.com