NASA officials said that Atlantis’ STS-122 mission remains on schedule for launch February 7 at 2:45 p.m. EST from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Earlier this week, the NASA technicians noticed during Atlantis’s launch preparations, a small section of a braided metal hose that was bent in a shape similar to the Greek letter Omega.

The radiator retract hose, part of the shuttle's cooling system that carries Freon, is designed to flex, but the engineers wanted to make sure they were not overlooking potential problems.

They designed a designed and tested a tool to guide the hose back into the storage box. The program managers gave the go ahead to close payload bay doors using the tool on Sunday evening.

Atlantis will carry the European-developed Columbus laboratory and attach it to the International Space Station. Seven astronauts, including two from the European Space Agency, will fly aboard Atlantis.

Columbus is about 23 feet long and 15 feet wide, allowing it to hold 10 "racks" of experiments, each approximately the size of a phone booth. Five NASA racks will be added to the laboratory once it is in orbit. Each rack provides independent controls for power and cooling, as well as communication links to earthbound controllers and researchers. These links will allow scientists all over Europe to participate in their own experiments in space from several user centers and, in some cases, even from their own work locations.

The Columbus laboratory's flexibility provides room for the researchers on the ground, aided by the station's crew, to conduct thousands of experiments in life sciences, materials sciences, fluid physics and other research in a weightless environment not possible on Earth.

In addition, the station crew can conduct experiments outside the module within the vacuum of space, thanks to four exterior mounting platforms that can accommodate external payloads. With a clear view of Earth and the vastness of space, external experiments can run the gamut from the microscopic world of bacteria to the limitlessness of space. The first two experiment packages will fly to the station on the shuttle with the module.

NASA has scheduled three spacewalks for the STS-122 mission. On flight day 4, Walheim and Schlegel’s main task will be to prepare the Columbus module for installation on Harmony. They will install the Power Data Grapple Fixture on Columbus, which will allow the space station’s robotic arm to grab the module and move it from the shuttle’s payload bay to

Harmony. The spacewalkers also will begin work to remove the Nitrogen Tank Assembly, a part of the station’s thermal control system, from the P1 truss. The assembly needs to be replaced because the nitrogen is running low.

On flight day 6, Walheim and Schlegel will remove the old NTA and temporarily store it on an equipment cart. They will then install the new one. The old NTA will be transferred to the shuttle’s payload bay for return home.

On flight day 8, Walheim and Love will install two payloads on Columbus’ exterior: SOLAR, an observatory to monitor the sun; and the European Technology Exposure Facility (EuTEF) that will carry eight different experiments requiring exposure to the space environment. The spacewalkers also will move a failed control moment gyroscope from its storage location on the station to the shuttle’s payload bay for return to Earth.