Space Shuttle Atlantis is expected to land at Kennedy Space Center at 05:57 local time on 20 September following the successful deployment of the International Space Station's (ISS) new port solar arrays, despite a software problem and a lost bolt.
On 12 September the 17,500kg (38,500lb), 13.7m (45ft)-long port three and port four (P3/P4) truss was attached to the ISS.
At about 08:00 GMT, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Steve MacLean and ISS expedition 13 flight engineer Jeffery Williams used the ISS remote manipulator system to move the P3/P4 truss to its new position at the end of the station's existing port one truss segment.
On the mission's first day of extra-vehicular activity (EVA), NASA astronauts Joe Tanner and Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper connected power cables and removed launch restraints from the array's blanket box and its Beta Gimbal Assembly.
The unfolding of the Lockheed Martin-built solar panels was to take place on 13 September but a software problem with the Solar Alpha Rotary Joint (SARJ), which rotates the arrays to follow the Sun, delayed that to the following day.
During that day's EVA, the mission's second, MacLean and NASA astronaut Dan Burbank worked on activating the SARJ, losing a bolt in the process. The 73.2m-wide array was fully unfolded at 14:44GMT on 14 September.
The array will not provide power to the ISS until further work is carried out during Shuttle Discovery's STS-116 mission in December.
Source: Flight International
