Space station 'armed' and ready for action

Space station Alpha with its new robot arm in the left foreground and the Raffaello cargo module at the top of the picture

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Texas -- Space station Alpha's newly attached robot arm will get better connected with the station on Tuesday, a day after the Alpha crew successfully flexed the arm in a series of tests.

Alpha crewmembers Jim Voss, Susan Helms and Russian commander Yury Usachev were at the controls as the arm was moved about 24 feet from its packing crate and anchored to Alpha, making the arm officially part of the station.

"Congratulations. You've just added a new part of the station," said Ellen Ochoa, at Mission Control in Houston.

"We've got a lot of excited people up here," Helms replied.

Voss said the arm was very smooth and precise, "just a joy to operate."

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The Alpha crew started working out the kinks in the arm shortly after greeting their visitors from the space shuttle Endeavour. The shuttle's hatches to the space station were opened about 5 a.m. EDT on Monday.

"Hey, how're you doing, you guys are awesome!" Voss said to shuttle commander Kent Rominger as the shuttle crew floated into the station.

Members of both crews snapped pictures between handshakes and hugs. The hatches were closed again later in the day to prepare a second spacewalk on Tuesday to finish connecting the station arm.

Endeavour docked with the station on Saturday, but its seven-man crew and the station's crew of three had to settle for waving at each other through a porthole as critical work was done.

Endeavour had to keep its hatches closed because of pressure differences with the station during a spacewalk by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and U.S. astronaut Scott Parazynski Sunday to unfold and power up the new 58-foot robot arm.

As Hadfield and Parazynski toiled for more than seven hours, Helms smiled at them through a station window and took pictures.

Helms, Voss and Usachev arrived at Alpha in March for a 4 1/2-month stay.

Installation of the new arm was a big day for Canada, which built the arm for the station. Hadfield was the first Canadian to perform a spacewalk.

"Thank you very much for all the people who helped put the arm here," he said. "Scott and I were just the deliverymen. And it really opens the door to what all of us can be doing together here internationally."

The arm, 3,618 pounds of steel, aluminum and graphite epoxy, has two hands and seven joints. It will act as a high-tech construction crane, walking end-over-end like an inchworm, to add pieces to the station and lessen the need for astronauts to do outside work during spacewalks.

The new space station robot arm is tested on Monday

After the new station arm was successfully attached to Alpha on Monday, Parazynski and Italian astronaut Umberto Guidoni cranked up the shuttle's 50-foot robot arm and latched onto an Italian-built cargo carrier, named Raffaello, in Endeavour's payload bay.

The carrier contains 10,000 pounds of supplies, from food and clothes to science experiments and racks to hold them. Raffaello was attached to the space station so that its contents could be loaded onto Alpha. Raffaello will be repacked with trash from Alpha and returned to the shuttle's cargo bay.

On Tuesday, Hadfield and Parazynski will go back outside to wire up the station arm in its new location. On Wednesday, the new arm will hand off its packing crate to the shuttle arm in a symbolic robotic handshake.

In June the new arm will hook up a pressure chamber to Alpha. That chamber will allow station astronauts to perform spacewalks without the aid of a shuttle.

Next year the station is scheduled to receive a rail car built by Canada to further extend the new arm's reach. Fingers will be added to the arm in 2003 to increase its dexterity.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Space stat

NASA
International space station Alpha

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