The crew of space shuttle Endeavour awoke at 5:14 p.m. EST to the song “Katmandu” by Bob Seger, played for shuttle Commander George Zamka.<\/p>\n
Today is docking day in space, as shuttle Endeavour closes the gap to the International Space Station and links up at about 12:06 a.m. Endeavour will be flown by Zamka and Pilot Terry Virts on its approach for docking to the station. After a series of jet firings to fine-tune Endeavour’s path to the complex, the shuttle will arrive at a point about 600 feet directly below the station about an hour before docking. At that time, Zamka will execute the rendezvous pitch maneuver, a one-degree-per-second rotational “backflip” to enable station crew members to snap hundreds of detailed photos of the shuttle’s heat shield and other areas of potential interest – another data point for imagery analysts to pore over in determining the health of the shuttle’s thermal protection system.<\/p>\n
Once the rotation is completed, Zamka will fly Endeavour in front of the station before slowly closing in for a linkup to the forward docking port on the Harmony module. Less than two hours later, hatches will be opened between the two spacecraft and a combined crew of 11 will begin eight days of work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The crew of space shuttle Endeavour awoke at 5:14 p.m. EST to the song “Katmandu” by Bob Seger, played for shuttle Commander George Zamka.<\/p>\n
Today is docking day in space, as shuttle Endeavour closes the gap to the International Space Station and links up at about 12:06 a.m. Endeavour will be flown by Zamka and Pilot Terry Virts on its approach for docking to the station. After a series of jet firings to fine-tune Endeavour’s path to the complex, the shuttle will arrive at a point about 600 feet directly below the station about an hour before docking. At that time, Zamka will execute the rendezvous pitch maneuver, a one-degree-per-second rotational “backflip” to enable station crew members to snap hundreds of detailed photos of the shuttle’s heat shield and other areas of potential interest – another data point for imagery analysts to pore over in determining the health of the shuttle’s thermal protection system.<\/p>\n
Once the rotation is completed, Zamka will fly Endeavour in front of the station before slowly closing in for a linkup to the forward docking port on the Harmony module. Less than two hours later, hatches will be opened between the two spacecraft and a combined crew of 11 will begin eight days of work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":612598,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-shuttle-update"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10801\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/612598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}