The four US astronauts who arrived aboard Atlantis began work with their six colleagues at the Iinternational Space Station to transfer a year’s worth of food and spare parts – nearly five tons’ worth – to the orbiting outpost.
Other supply ships from Europe, Japan and Russia will be able to stock the ISS when the shuttle programme retires after Atlantis’s mission, but the amount of cargo space available aboard the shuttle is unparalleled.
The Raffaello multipurpose logistics module was lifted out of the shuttle’s cargo bay and placed with the help of a Canadian robotic arm onto the space station’s Harmony node, Nasa said.
The container is “packed with 4,265 kilos of spare parts, spare equipment, and other supplies – including 1,215 kilos of food – that will sustain space station operations for a year,” Nasa said.
Over the coming days, the combined crew will be transferring items from the Raffaello to the station and moving more than 2,540 kilos of old station gear, including a failed ammonia pump, back into the module for return to earth.
“It is pretty much all hands on deck,” said Mr Jason. “It is going to be a very busy time period.”
Astronauts aboard the shuttle Atlantis will get one extra day in space, it was announced yesterday. They started to unload a year’s worth of supplies at the International Space Station after Nasa said on Monday a piece of Soviet space debris was not likely to collide with orbiting lab.
The US space agency said it was tracking the space junk on Sunday, shortly after the shuttle Atlantis docked on its final mission, and warned that a maneuver with the shuttle’s thrusters might be necessary to avoid it.
But those concerns were alleviated when the agency determined the two were not on a collision course after all.
“We got some updates since the docking and everything indicates that the debris will be well clear of the station,” said flight director Jerry Jason, adding it was expected to pass 18 kilometres from the lab.
“So we are not going to take any action to move out of the way,” Mr Jason said.
Nasa has said such events are not uncommon and that 500,000 such objects are being tracked in the earth’s orbit.
This particular piece of space junk was part of Cosmos 375, a satellite launched in 1970 by the former Soviet Union and which collided with another satellite and broke apart.
“The original concern was that the way we were docking was going to push us a little closer to the debris,” said Mr Jason.