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Hurricane Ike delays space station supply deliveries as Mission Control moves to storm quarters
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Hurricane Ike/ NASA GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio
As NASA flight controllers evacuated Mission Control in Houston earlier today, Russian and American mission managers agreed to delay the docking of an unmanned cargo ship. The Progress M-65 spacecraft, launched from Russia's Kazakhstan facility on Sept. 10, had been scheduled to dock with the International Space Station(ISS) on Friday.
Instead, the docking is now tentatively scheduled for Sept. 17. The delay in the docking is just one of a string of weather-based delays affecting spaceflight. Four NASA facilities in three states have been forced to close during the last two weeks as Tropical Storm Fay, Hurricane Gustav, and now Hurricane Ike roared into the U.S.
The cargo ship carries more than two tons of supplies, including food and fuel. The precise commands to dock the ship at the station require participation from NASA's Mission Control at Johnson Space Center.
Flight controllers have set up temporary operations at a hotel in Austin, TX. Using laptops, they'll maintain communications with the space station.
A control room at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, is being used as a backup facility for communications between the controllers and the space station. The computers at Mission Control in Houston are safeguarded by generator backups that kick in even if full power goes out, so all systems and data will be available to backup control facilities.
This control room normally focuses on scientific experiments. As part of NASA's planned "redundancy" mode, the Huntsville facility can assist the evacuated controllers working in Austin with some work items.
Russian space flight controllers will maneuver Progress into a safe orbit near the ISS until docking can be achieved.
Earlier, NASA flew twenty-two T-38 astronaut training jets and a high-altitude research aircraft out of Houston's Ellington Field. They'll be housed in El Paso until Hurricane Ike clears the Houston area.
At Kennedy Space Center, Space Shuttle Endeavour moved to the Vehicle Assembly Building for mating with its external tank and solid rocket boosters. The shuttle is scheduled to roll out to its launch pad on Sept. 18.
In addition to its assignment on a space station re-supply and astronaut swap-out mission, Endeavour must be flight ready in time for Atlantis' Oct. 10 launch. The STS-125 Hubble servicing mission is so dangerous that mission managers decided that Endeavour must be ready to launch quickly if needed to come to the aid of Atlantis and her crew. Even if the STS-126 mission fulfills just its standard assignment, the launch window is so tight that managers can't afford much more slippage in processing schedules.
The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), which snapped the microwave image of Hurricane Ike, is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Launched in 1997, TRMM has been so succesful that in 2005 NASA decided to extend the original three-year mission through 2010.
TRMM is one of a fleet of NASA satellites keeping watch over Planet Earth. It is managed byf Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
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