The landing mission - after new facilities were raised in the previous missions, this time it is necessary to fill the warehouses and upgrade the infrastructure at the station
Five days have passed since the Space Shuttle Discovery was launched on mission STS-128 to the International Space Station. Compared to its predecessors, this is a relatively gray task, when the main task of the crew members is to load the station with heavy equipment, before it becomes impossible to bring it any more to the station, when the ferry operations will be stopped in less than a year.
The shuttle carried a small cargo container, Leonardo, containing the equipment required for the space station and, among other things, a training system to maintain the fitness of the astronauts known as COLBERT following the proposal of an American comedian of that name that NASA accepted as a tribute to the general public. The Leonardo device was ejected shortly after the shuttle's arrival at the station, from the shuttle's cargo deck to the cargo hatch of the space station's harmonic component.
In addition, the first of two spacewalks was performed yesterday. They were Danny Olivas and Nicole Scott, and they upgraded the infrastructure on the outside of the station. They stayed outside the station for six hours and 35 minutes. Both arrived on the space shuttle Discovery, but Scott became a member of the space station crew as she replaced Tim Korpe, who would return to Earth in her place on the shuttle.
At the same time, the other 11 crew members of the shuttle and the station continued unloading the Leonardo, and among other things, they unloaded the air purification system, equipment for a new residential district and the Colbert training facility (Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill).
Several experimental facilities were also transferred from Leonardo to the station, including a cabinet for the integration of fluids, a cabinet for storing materials for scientific research, and a freezer at a temperature of minus eighty degrees Celsius for the International Space Station.
