Sunday, July 17, 2011

Say Goodbye, Part 6

Here are a couple more montages from the last Space Shuttle mission. These are from the spacewalk done by International Space Station (ISS) astronauts Ron Garan and Mike Fossum to fix a bad fuel system, and install an experimental robotic fuel system.

The first shows Mike Fossum climbing into his space suit to start the walk, then going to the ISS hatch to step outside. If you look carefully in the last couple of frames, you'll see the clip on his safety tether, as he tries to hook it prior to going outside:

Image credit: Montages of screenshots from this NASA video by Cujo359

[Click on the pictures to enlarge. They're much bigger when seen full size.]

Sure makes figuring out what to wear to work in the morning seem like a trivial task, doesn't it? Of course, there aren't many offices with a view like these:


Believe it or not, there's an astronaut space walking in each frame.

Here's a photo one of the spacewalkers took while he was outside, with the nose of Atlantis visible on the right:

Image credit: NASA

The Shuttle should be separating from the ISS tomorrow, and heading back to Earth:
Sun, 17 Jul 2011 07:53:09 PM PST

Today’s wakeup song was “Days Go By,” by Keith Urban, played at 10:29 p.m. EDT, along with a special message from employees at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston: “Good morning, Atlantis, from all of us at the Johnson Space Center! Have a great mission!”

This is the last full day a space shuttle will spend docked to the International Space Station. After buttoning up the Raffaello multipurpose module, the astronauts will use the station’s robotic arm to move Raffaello from the Harmony node’s Earth-facing port to the cargo bay of shuttle Atlantis. At 9:19 a.m. the shuttle and station crews will say farewell and close the hatches between the two spacecraft.

Crew to Move Raffaello and Say Farewell to Station
[As always, NASA doesn't believe in providing permalinks to these bulletins. That link might not be good a few days from now.]

Finally, one more shot of the ISS Cupola, taken from the Shuttle:
Image credit: NASA

No doubt the ISS crew will be peeking out of there tomorrow, waving goodbye to one of the great engineering achievements of the Twentieth Century.


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