The crew of space shuttle Atlantis awoke at 3:20 a.m. EDT to the song “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd, played for pilot Tony Antonelli. He dedicated the song to the team at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama for its role in and support of the mission.<\/p>\n
Today is docking day in space. The terminal initiation burn at 7:40 a.m. will put the shuttle on the final course to link up with the International Space Station at about 10:27 a.m.<\/p>\n
Commander Ken Ham and pilot Antonelli will fly Atlantis on its approach for docking to the station. After a series of jet firings to fine-tune the shuttle’s path to the complex, Atlantis will arrive at a point about 600 feet directly below the station about an hour before docking. At that time, Ham 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, Ham will fly Atlantis in front of the station before slowly docking. Less than two hours later, at 12:30 p.m., hatches will be opened between the two spacecraft, and a combined crew of 12 will begin six days of work as they operate the station’s robotic arm to relocate the Integrated Cargo Carrier from Atlantis’ payload bay to the station’s Mobile Base System in preparation for the next day’s first spacewalk of the mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The crew of space shuttle Atlantis awoke at 3:20 a.m. EDT to the song “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd, played for pilot Tony Antonelli. He dedicated the song to the team at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama for its role in and support of the mission.<\/p>\n
Today is docking day in space. The terminal initiation burn at 7:40 a.m. will put the shuttle on the final course to link up with the International Space Station at about 10:27 a.m.<\/p>\n
Commander Ken Ham and pilot Antonelli will fly Atlantis on its approach for docking to the station. After a series of jet firings to fine-tune the shuttle’s path to the complex, Atlantis will arrive at a point about 600 feet directly below the station about an hour before docking. At that time, Ham 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, Ham will fly Atlantis in front of the station before slowly docking. Less than two hours later, at 12:30 p.m., hatches will be opened between the two spacecraft, and a combined crew of 12 will begin six days of work as they operate the station’s robotic arm to relocate the Integrated Cargo Carrier from Atlantis’ payload bay to the station’s Mobile Base System in preparation for the next day’s first spacewalk of the mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":612598,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28659","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\/28659","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\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28659\/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=28659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}