STS-121 crew members and members of the International Space Station's 13th crew had a very busy day after docking on Thursday. They used the station's robotic arm to hoist the multipurpose Leonardo logistics capsule out of Discovery's trunk and docked it with the station on Friday at 15:15 p.m. Israel time.
The shuttle commander, Steve Lindsey, and the flight director of the station crew, the German Thomas Reiter, who arrived on the shuttle and will join the station crew members, will perform a leak test before entering the Leonardo cabin, which contains over 3 tons of supplies and equipment for the station.
Later, three Discovery crew members Mark Kelly and Lisa Novak and Stephanie Williams used the shuttle's robotic arm to perform scans of the shuttle's thermal protection system.
Today, Saturday, at 16:13 the first spacewalk is scheduled to begin. Mike Possum and Piers Sellers already started yesterday, Friday, preparing the air shoe and organizing the tools they will use in the spacewalk, which is expected to last 6.5 hours. Among the tasks planned for the two outside the spacecraft - maintenance work in one of the wings of the station, and an experiment to see what the movement of an astronaut at the end of the elongated part of the robotic arm means in case in one of the future flights it will be necessary to carry out repairs at distances that can only be reached with the robotic arm
