Solar array redeployed after successful repair

[kdavis007]

Physician-astronaut Scott Parazynski, working on the end of a boom carried by the space station's robot arm, successfully repaired a mangled solar array today, cutting away a snarled guidewire, installing five suture-like braces and then standing by while his crewmates extended the array its full 110-foot length.<br /><br />Working with deliberate care, astronaut Dan Tani, sending commands from a computer inside the shuttle-station complex, extended the array's central mast a half bay at a time, stopping and letting Parazynski assess the health of the repairs as tension slowly built up on the just-installed braces.<br /><br />There were no problems and as the last bay of the array's mast extended and locked into place, putting some 70 pounds of tension on the blanet's slats, sensors indicated full extension and Tani exclaimed, "Oh, we've got deploy discretes, two deploy discretes!"<br /><br />"Yay, all right!" someone yelled.<br /><br />"Beautiful."<br /><br />"Great news," Parazynski said. "What an accomplishment."<br /><br />"Nice teamwork," congratulated station commander Peggy Whitson.<br /><br />"Phenomenal," Parazynski agreed.<br /><br />"Excellent work, guys, excellent," Whitson said.<br /><br />"But it's not over yet," Discovery commander Pam Melroy said. "We've still got to get you inside."<br /><br />"That would be nice," Parazynski said.<br /><br />"Those are the minor details, but thank you guys very much," astronaut Steve Swanson radioed from Houston.<br /><br />A successful repair was critical to NASA's plans for continuing space station assembly. At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday, engineers moved the shuttle Atlantis from its hangar to the Vehicle Assembly Building for attachment to a set of boosters and an external tank. Launch on the next space station assembly mission, a high-profile flight to deliver Europe's Columbus research module, is targeted for Dec. 6.<br /><br />Because of problems with the station's right-side solar array rotary joint, NASA needed

 

[kdavis007]

Good news..

 

[MeteorWayne]

This has been being discussed in the STS-120 and the solar array thread for the last 8 hours <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080"><em><font color="#000000">But the Krell forgot one thing John. Monsters. Monsters from the Id.</font></em> </font></p><p><font color="#000080">I really, really, really, really miss the "first unread post" function</font><font color="#000080"> </font></p> </div>