As you’ve probably heard by now, NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak was arrested this week, and charged with attempted kidnapping. Nowak, who flew on board the space shuttle Atlantis just last July, was captured by police when she attempted to confront rival Colleen Shipman over the affections of a third astronaut: Bill Oefelein. Nowak was found with a variety of weapons on her and in her car.
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Discovery Pulls Away from the Station
After 8 days docked together, and 4 spacewalks, the astronauts on board the International Space Station and the space shuttle Discovery big farewell to one another and closed the hatch. Discovery then detached from the station and drifted slowly away. Astronauts on board captured a series of photographs of the station as they pulled away.
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Astronauts Fold Up a Solar Panel on the Final Spacewalk
On their fourth and final trip outside the International Space Station, US astronaut Robert Curbeam and Sweden’s Christer Fuglesang convinced a misbehaving solar panel to fold up nicely. The team suited up and began their spacewalk on Monday at 1910 GMT (2:10 pm EST). Working with the panel was hard, slow work, eventually requiring about five hours of poking panels and shaking the storage box to get the stuck sections to fold up properly. With the solar panel safely folded away, the station’s new panels are free to rotate to face the Sun and generate the maximum amount of electricity.
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Astronauts Working to Fold Arrays
Mission Specialists Robert Curbeam and Christer Fuglesang have gone back outside the International Space Station to try and get its troublesome solar arrays to retract properly. Imagine a big fold out map, that’s supposed to go back on exactly the same folds. It’s not folding back up again, and nothing they tried from inside fixed it. Time to do this hands on.
Curbeam and Fuglesang stepped out around 2pm EST, and they should get back in around 8:25 pm EST, after more than six hours in space.
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Station’s Solar Panels Retracted Halfway
Shuttle astronauts spent a frustrating day today, trying to get the International Space Station’s solar wings retracted. NASA was hoping to retract the wings fully to allow new permanent solar panels to rotate to face the Sun and begin generating electricity. Astronauts did get the wings partially retracted; far enough to allow the larger wings to rotate, so NASA is considering the day a success. A spacewalk might be scheduled later in the week, for astronauts to manually assist folding the array.
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First STS-116 Space Walk Wraps Up
Construction is continued on the International Space Station today, when the crew of STS-116 went outside on their first spacewalk to attach the P5 truss segment. Bob Curbeam and Christer Fuglesang did the spacewalking, while Joan Higginbotham and Sunita Williams worked the robot arm to assist the construction. Two more spacewalks are planned during STS-116 to reconfigure and redistribute power generated by the solar arrays.
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Discovery Blasts Off in Rare Night Launch
The space shuttle Discovery blasted off Saturday night, beginning a new mission to the International Space Station. The launch was initially scheduled for Thursday night, but low clouds forced managers to push it back. Over the next 12 days, Discovery will link up the station, and the astronauts will help install the new P5 truss. This structure will extend the station’s backbone, and allow future solar panels to rotate. Discovery will reach the station on Monday.
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Discovery Launch Planned for December 7
NASA senior managers have picked December 7 for the next launch for the space shuttle Discovery. If all goes well, STS-116 will blast off at 9:35 pm local time (0235 GMT December 8) carrying 7 astronauts, and return to the International Space Station. This time, the construction job will be to install a new section of the station’s girder-like truss, and activate its power and cooling systems.
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NASA is Go for Hubble Repair
Finally some good news for the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA announced a new space shuttle mission to repair and upgrade the aging space telescope. This fifth and final visit to Hubble is tentatively scheduled for Fall 2008. Astronauts will install two new instruments: the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which will help probe large-scale structures in the Universe, and the Wide Field Camera 3, a very sensitive instrument capable of seeing from infrared to ultraviolet wavelengths.
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Atlantis Back on Earth, Safe and Sound
Atlantis and its astronaut crew returned safely back to Earth this morning after 12 days in space. The shuttle touched down at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1021 GMT (6:21am EDT). During its mission, the shuttle and astronauts delivered and installed the P3/P4 truss segment to the International Space Station, dramatically increasing its solar panels and power generation.
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