Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 16:08:47 -0600 (CST)
From: info@jsc.nasa.gov
Subject: International Space Station Status Report #54
 
2002
Expedition 6 Crew 

After almost a month on the International Space Station, crewmembers were
literally bouncing off the walls of the orbiting laboratory on Monday.
They wound up the week with extensive and successful robotic arm
operations on Thursday and on Friday worked with setup of the High Rate
Communications Outage Recorder (HCOR).
 
The contact with the walls of the station's U.S. laboratory Destiny was
carefully planned.  It produced vibrations for a data take with the
Internal Wireless Instrumentation System (IWIS). IWIS software has been
upgraded and the data take was for a structural dynamics experiment.
 
Expedition 6 Commander Ken Bowersox, Flight Engineer Nikolai Budarin, and
NASA ISS Science Officer Don Pettit worked during the week on a number of
science activities, including biomedical tests and the Zeolite Crystal
Growth (ZCG) experiment. Bowersox suggested spinning the autoclaves of
the experiment, designed to produce Zeolite crystals larger than can be
grown on Earth, to concentrate bubbles that formed in the sample's
center.  The suggestion contributed to the success of the experiment.
Bowersox also had a practice run for his upcoming Foot/Ground Reaction
Forces (FOOT) experiment. Pettit installed the Express Rack 3 laptop and
later activated and checked out the rack, delivered to the station
several months ago.
 
The crew and Russian ground stations tested the Kurs-P passive ring, and
later Budarin reconfigured the Kurs-P radar system, used in Russian
automated rendezvous and docking operations. The crew did more than three
hours of tests of the Canadarm2 on Thursday.  Tests included a series of
grapples on a Mobile Base System fixture while collecting Force Moment
Sensor (FMS) data.
 
The HCOR is a data recorder that stores information collected while the
station is not in contact with the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite
(TDRS) system, for later transmission to the ground.  It will replace a
medium rate recorder, giving the station greater capacity to store
information from scientific experiments and elsewhere and transmit it
when the station can use the TDRS system.
 
Flight control teams in Houston and Moscow continue to work on
rescheduling the increment's only planned spacewalk, now expected to
occur in January.  The spacewalk includes tasks to continue outfitting
the station's new P1 Truss.
 
Information on the crew's activities aboard the space station, future
launch dates, as well as station sighting opportunities from anywhere on
the Earth, is available on the Internet at:
 
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/
 
Details on station science operations can be found on an Internet site
administered by the Payload Operations Center at NASA's Marshall Space
Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., at:
 
http://www.scipoc.msfc.nasa.gov/
 
The next ISS status report will be issued on Friday, Dec. 27, or sooner
if events warrant