Mar 10
NASA’s fifth orbiter shuttle, Endeavor, has been cleared for liftoff on March 11 and will be performing a very special operation: setting up a Japanese laboratory at NASA’s space station and also fitting it with special robotic arms that have been made in Canada. The collaborative technology being implemented breaks new grounds in the pooling of resources from various parts of the world to undertake a truly global mission to the stars!
Endeavor has already been on one mission since the space shuttle Columbia was destroyed in 2005 while reentering the Earth’s atmosphere after a mission. Endeavor will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the early hours of March 11 to carry the Japanese-made Kibo, which is a newly developed space module, to the International Space Station. Endeavor’s mission is to assemble the Kibo laboratory at the space station during the course of two weeks.
So what’s so special about Kibo, you ask? For one thing, it’s a very sophisticated piece of work. What Endeavor will be carrying up into space this week is only the first of three modules that will go into the making of the Kibo laboratory. It is planned to be completed by the end of 2009. Kibo has been specially designed to conduct complex procedures in a zero gravity environment. This first module is a pretty complicated piece of work—it requires the use of two robotic arms that will be fitted on its external surface. Think HAL (from 2001) with mobility! Kibo’s arms have been specially constructed by the Canadian Space Agency, and have been (somewhat cutely) named Dextre. With Dextre as the eyes and ears and Kibo as the brain in control, the Endeavor crew will make five space walks during its sixteen day mission to space.
The Endeavor crew also has another special mission: to conduct testing on a special heat shield that will protect space shuttles when they conduct routine maintenance and repairs on the Hubble Space Telescope later this year. If this heat shield should fail while a space shuttle is performing its maintenance operations at the Hubble Telescope, any shuttle could be in danger of facing the same fate as Columbia. In fact, had such tests been carried out as a precaution before Columbia was sent on its mission, the space shuttle may not have met the horrific fate that it did.
Endeavor now sits on its launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center where it was moved in mid February, and awaits liftoff. A similar mission has already been conducted by the space shuttle Atlantis. Coincidentally, Atlantis is the same shuttle that will be conducting the next scheduled maintenance on the Hubble Telescope later this year. Atlantis brought another laboratory, named Columbus and designed in Europe, to the International Space Station in February 2008. It looks like NASA is now collaborating with space agencies across the globe to make space exploration a truly multicultural phenomenon!
