On Wednesday Harmony with PMA-2 on its outboard end is scheduled to be moved from its temporary position on the Unity node to the front of Destiny.
The unbolting of the four sets of bolts securing PMA-2 to the front of Destiny went smoothly. Those bolts had been in place since PMA-2 was attached to the lab on Feb. 12, 2001.
ISS commander Peggy Whitson and Dan Tani, the newly arrived flight engineer of Expedition 16 completed have completed the release of the final set of bolts at 5:02 a.m. and PMA-2 was separated from Destiny ten minutes later.
Tani then moved PMA-2 to the station's port side and toward
the outboard end of Harmony and its preinstall position.
Tani brought the docking port was brought to Harmony's berthing mechanism, where the process to secure it began. Driving the last of the four groups of four bolts each was driven into place at 6:29 a.m., permanently securing PMA-2 to its new home.
After its Wednesday move, Harmony will be in position to
welcome visiting space shuttles. It also will offer docking ports to the
European Space Agency's
Columbus will be stowed aboard the Atlantis shuttle when it launches December 6, part of a dizzying schedule of shuttle flights being made in a rush to double capacity on the space station by 2010, when NASA's ageing shuttle fleet is set to retire.
The Columbus External Payload Facility (Columbus-EPF)
consists of two identical L-shaped consoles attached to the starboard cone of
The first payload facilities planned for Columbus-EPF are European Technology Exposure Facility (EuTEF) and Sun Monitoring on the External Payload Facility of Columbus (Solar) which will be installed during the STS-122/1E mission during an extravehicular activity (EVA) by crewmembers.