Thursday, February 18, 2010

Crews Back to Work After Speaking With President

President Obama, congressional leaders and middle school students spoke with the astronaut crews of the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle Endeavour at 5:14 p.m. EST Wednesday and congratulated them on their successful ongoing mission. The call took place from the Roosevelt Room of the White House.

Afterwards, crew members transferred and installed racks in the station’s new Tranquility node, reboosted the station using Endeavour’s thrusters, reconfigured spacesuits and passed the 75-percent mark of supply and equipment transfers between the two spacecraft.

Space Shuttle Mission: STS-130

President Obama
Image above: U.S. President Barack Obama, accompanied by White House Science Adviser John Holdren, left, Congressman C.A. "Dutch" Ruppersberger (D-MD) and middle school children, talks on the phone from the Roosevelt Room of the White House to astronauts on the International Space Station.

› Meet the STS-130 Crew

Crews Back to Work After Receiving Presidential Call
After a chat with the president an hour after their wakeup call, it was back to the nuts-and-bolts work of spaceflight for the crews of Endeavour and the International Space Station.

At 4:17 p.m. EST on Wednesday, all 11 astronauts and cosmonauts on the docked vehicles received a congratulatory phone call from President Barack Obama, who was accompanied at the White House by a dozen middle school students from across the country who are in Washington, D.C. for a national engineering competition.

› Read more about the call from President Obama

Afterwards, crew members transferred and installed racks in the station’s new Tranquility node, reboosted the station using Endeavour’s thrusters, reconfigured spacesuits and passed the 75-percent mark of supply and equipment transfers between the two spacecraft. Their work, during a bonus day added for the rack transfers, generally went smoothly.

A little after 1:30 a.m. CST, Endeavour Commander George Zamka and Pilot Terry Virts began a 33-minute reboost of the station, using the shuttle’s attitude control jets. When it was completed, the station’s altitude had been raised by about 1.3 statute miles to an orbit of 219 by 208 miles.

In the Quest airlock, Mission Specialists Robert Behnken and Nicholas Patrick reconfigured spacesuits they had used on their three spacewalks, preparing some parts for return to Earth. They also stowed spacewalking tools.

Additional Resources
› STS-130 Press Kit (8.7 Mb PDF)
› STS-130 Mission Summary (448 Kb PDF)
› Reusable Solid Rocket Motor and Solid Rocket Boosters
› Fact Sheet: Remaining Shuttle Missions (1.3 Mb PDF)

Orbiter Status
› About the Orbiters

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