Shuttle crew fine-tune science lab

Source: Agencies  |   2008-6-8  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

AS their flight hit the halfway mark, shuttle Discovery's astronauts faced more work with the space station's new science lab yesterday.

All 10 occupants of the linked shuttle and station chipped in on Friday to get Japan's billion-dollar Kibo lab up and running, and to expand its size by attaching an attic to it.

Yesterday - one week into their mission - the astronauts planned to test drive the lab's 10-meter robot arm.

Kibo's attic °?- essentially a 4.26-meter shed, or closet, for spare tools and equipment - was popped atop the 11-meter lab by astronauts operating the international space station's robot arm. Even before Friday's addition, the billion-dollar, bus-size Kibo was the biggest room at the space station.

The attic had been in a temporary location at the space station since March. There wasn't enough room on a space shuttle to fit both the attic and lab, so NASA split them into two flights. The third and final Japanese section, a porch for outdoor experiments, will be launched next spring.

In an interview on Friday, Discovery's commander, Mark Kelly, said Kibo was so "incredibly big" that the astronauts had to take extra care inside of it.

"You can get out in the middle of it and you can't reach a handrail and you could possibly get stuck there for a little while," Kelly said.

Later in the day, Mission Control informed Kelly that Kibo was looking more like a lab. When the astronauts opened up Kibo on Wednesday, a day after installing it, the lab was empty and provided lots of room for weightless acrobatics. Racks for experiments quickly consumed some of the space.

"I guess there are no more dance parties," Mission Control joked.

Late on Friday, Mission Control asked the astronauts to take some zoom-in digital photos of two thermal protective panels on Discovery's right wing. Mission Control said embedded sensors had picked up some slight pulses a few days earlier, indicating possible micrometeorite impacts, and while engineers did not think anything was amiss they wanted to make certain.

The astronauts beamed down more than 50 photos.

The sensors are among safety measures put in place after Columbia was destroyed during re-entry in 2003 because of a gashed wing.