Astronauts check Discovery for damage
(Reuters)Updated: 2006-12-11 07:46
The first spacewalk on the 12-day mission will involve installing an $11 million addition to the space lab, while the second and third will be for rewiring the station from its temporary power system to the permanent one. The solar power arrays that were brought up during the last mission will be used for the first time after that reconfiguration is complete.
Discovery's crew will bring home one of the space station's three crew members, German astronaut Thomas Reiter of the European Space Agency. American astronaut Sunita "Suni" Williams will replace him, staying for six months.
Robert Curbeam will spacewalk three times. Other crew members are commander Mark Polansky, pilot William Oefelein, and mission specialists Patrick, Williams, Joan Higginbotham and the European Space Agency's Christer Fuglesang, the first Swede in space.
Five of Discovery's astronauts, including Patrick, are first-timers to space.
They woke up on their first morning in zero gravity to a transmission from Houston of The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun," an allusion by flight control to how the shuttle lit up the nighttime sky during its ascent Saturday.
"Good morning, Discovery. We especially want to thank you for the burst of sunshine you brought into our lives last night. It was an awesome launch," Shannon Lucid from Mission Control radioed up to the crew.
"It was pretty great for all of us, too," Polansky responded.
NASA had required daytime launches for the first three flights after Columbia, but now feels comfortable with the improvements made since then.
The Columbia disintegrated while re-entering the atmosphere, killing the crew members.
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