The first of three scheduled spacewalks is scheduled for today at 3:42PM EST. NASA reports:
Expedition 14, STS-116 Exchange Crew Members
Image above: A camera aboard Space Shuttle Discovery captured this view of the International Space Station as the shuttle approached for docking. Image credit: NASA TV
The Expedition 14 crew lost one member and gained another Monday night during the first crew exchange at the International Space Station during a shuttle mission in four years.
NASA Astronaut Sunita Williams, who arrived at the station Monday afternoon with the STS-116 mission, replaced European Space Agency Astronaut Thomas Reiter on the Expedition 14 crew at midnight EST Tuesday. Her crewmates are Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin. Williams will spend six months on the outpost. She will become a member of the Expedition 15 crew in March 2007.
Reiter will wrap up a five-month stay on the station when he leaves with STS-116 next week. He arrived at the station in July with the STS-121 mission to give the station its first three-member crew since May 2003. He was a member of Expedition 13 until Expedition 14 began its tour of duty in September.
The crew rotation became official when their custom-made seatliners were swapped out in the Soyuz spacecraft docked to the station.
Discovery, which docked at 5:12 p.m. Monday, also delivered the P5 integrated truss structure to the station. The P5 will be attached to the end of the P4 to set the stage for the addition of the P6. Three spacewalks are scheduled during STS-116’s stay to install the P5 and to reconfigure and redistribute power generated by the station’s newest solar arrays. The first excursion is scheduled to take place Tuesday.
About an hour before docking, STS-116 Commander Mark Polansky guided Discovery through a back-flip maneuver to allow the station’s Expedition 14 crew to take pictures of Discovery’s heat shield. The images will be downlinked to the ground for analysis by shuttle engineers.
The Expedition 14 and STS-116 crews will conduct a week of joint operations. In addition to the spacewalks, they will transfer cargo between the vehicles. Discovery and its crew are scheduled to stay at the station until Dec. 18.
For the latest news and information on STS-116, visit the main shuttle page. + Read more
+ Read more about Expedition 14
+ View crew’s daily timelines
NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency have named two astronauts and two cosmonauts to the next International Space Station crew, known as Expedition 15. Astronauts Clayton Anderson and Daniel Tani will travel to the station next year and work as flight engineers. Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Dr. Oleg Kotov will spend six months aboard the orbiting laboratory.
+ Read more about Expedition 15
+ Read the press release
STS-116 Mission Specialists Robert Curbeam and Christer Fuglesang will go spacewalking today. The primary objective of the spacewalk is to install a new piece to the space station’s girder-like truss. The two-ton piece will be the fifth truss segment added to the port side of the station and is called the P5 spacer.