Image: NASA/Jim GrossmannPRESS KIT: The Mission. "A Room with a View"
-STS-130 Endeavour: FLASH TIME-LINE!
NASA: Space shuttle Endeavour lights up the night sky as it lifts off from Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The primary payload for the STS-130 mission to the International Space Station is the tranquility node, a pressurized module that will provide additional room for crew members and many of the station's life support and environmental control systems.
Commander George Zamka leads the mission, which will deliver the Tranquility node and a seven-windowed cupola to be used as a control room for robotics...The module was built in Turin, Italy, by Thales Alenia Space for the European Space Agency.
UPDATE: The lovely Italian designed, Cupola...(left) With convenient shutters to protect against meteors... Mission Mgr: Scott Higginbotham!
Attached to one end of Tranquility is a cupola, a unique work area with six windows on its sides and one on top. The cupola resembles a circular bay window and will provide a vastly improved view of the station's exterior.
The multi-directional view will allow the crew to monitor spacewalks and docking operations, as well as provide a spectacular view of Earth and other celestial objects.
WONDERFUL ISS TOUR: BIG SCREEN!!
STS-130: Spectacular Launch Begins a Complex Mission:
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:13:21 AM PST.
"What a beautiful launch we had this morning... the orbiter performed extremely well," said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Space Operations, during the STS-130 postlaunch news conference. "This is a great start to a very complicated mission."Jean-Jacques Dordain, European Space Agency director general, thanked NASA, the crew and the ground teams for "a very beautiful launch." Dordain said, "It was an important event. Even more important for us because the shuttle was full of European hardware."
Posted earlier....
VIDEO: Opening the port shutter in the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) and then switches with time lapse view to Endeavours left window looking at the JEM showing one orbital day pass with solar array motion and shadow motion. The solar panels rotate relative to the ISS so that they track the sun. One image taken every 15 seconds and played back at 5 frames per image...
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