SUBMITTED BY ARTHUR N1ORC - AMSAT A/c #31468
*Joint Operations End; Endeavour to Undock Sunday* 18 AUGUST 2007
Expedition 15 Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineers Oleg Kotov and Clay Anderson concluded joint operations with the STS-118 crew Saturday afternoon. STS-118’s stay at the station began Aug. 10 and featured four spacewalks to continue the on-orbit construction of the station.
The STS-118 crew exited the station before hatches closed at 5:10 p.m. EDT Saturday in preparation for undocking on Sunday.
In addition to the seven STS-118 astronauts, Space Shuttle Endeavour carried the Starboard 5 (S5) truss segment to the station and STS-118 spacewalkers installed it Aug. 11. The S5 truss segment is part of the station’s Integrated Truss Structure that will eventually be the length of a football field and contain four sets of solar arrays.
The station received a new control moment gyroscope (CMG) on Monday during the second spacewalk. The station has four CMGs that are used to control its attitude in orbit. The new CMG replaced a faulty gyroscope that will return to Earth on a future shuttle mission.
On Tuesday, the International Space Station’s first component to go into space, the Zarya control module, passed the 50,000th orbit mark at 11:17 a.m. EDT. Zarya, which is Russian for “Sunrise,” was funded by the United States and built by Russia. It launched atop a Proton rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Nov. 20, 1998.
The third spacewalk occurred Wednesday. It featured preparations for the relocation of the Port 6 truss from atop the station to the end of the Port 5 truss when STS-120 visits later this year. A fourth spacewalk took place Saturday in which an antenna was installed and two materials science experiments were retrieved for return to Earth.
In other activities, the two crews transferred cargo between Endeavour and the station . + Read more about Expedition 15 http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition15/index.html + View crew daily timelines http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/timelines/index.html