US teacher gives first lesson from space

The first teacher in space has taught her first lesson in zero-gravity, answering questions from school children in Idaho from an orbiting station hundreds of miles above Earth.

Barbara Morgan, flanked by crewmates Alvin Drew and Dave Williams, talked for 25 minutes to children at the Discovery Center in Boise, Idaho, the north-western state where Morgan taught at a primary school early in her career.

"Astronauts and teachers actually do the same thing. We explore, we discover and we share," she told the class via videolink. "Those are absolutely wonderful jobs."

Mrs Morgan, now 55, trained as understudy to fellow teacher Christa McAuliffe in the 1980s, as NASA hoped that sending a teacher into space would fire the imaginations of millions and keep up support for its shuttle program.

But McAuliffe never made it to space. The Challenger shuttle exploded shortly after take-off in 1986, killing all seven people on board.

Twenty-two years later, Mrs Morgan has fulfilled the aim, riding aboard the shuttle Endeavour on a construction mission to the International Space Station.

In a session broadcast to Earth by the space agency NASA, she fielded questions such as how fast a baseball travels in space, and how to drink in zero-gravity.

She and her fellow astronauts demonstrated, throwing real balls and swallowing floating bubbles of liquid.

Asked how astronauts exercise in space, Mrs Morgan grabbed one of her colleagues and lifted him.

Mrs Morgan returned to teaching after the Challenger disaster, but in the 1990s started six years of training in the astronaut corps.

She is the star of this year's second shuttle mission to the International Space Station.

NASA is seeking to burnish an image tainted by recent scandals including stories that astronauts had shown up for missions drunk, and a bizarre love-triangle vendetta involving a female astronaut and her married colleague.

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10/24/06: Christer Fuglesang of Space Shuttle Mission STS-116.

Landing Site: Kennedy e Center map, December 22, Main gear touchdown: 5:32:00 p.m. EST; Nose gear touchdown: 5:32:12 p.m. EST; Wheels stop: 5:32:52 p.m. EST; Total miles: 5.3 million

Inclination/Altitude: 51.6 degrees/122 nautical miles

Primary Payload: Twentieth station flight (12A.1), EHAB, P5

Crew: Polansky, Oefelein, Curbeam, Higginbotham, Patrick, Fuglesang, Williams (up), Reiter (down)

Video, Mpeg

With NASA's launch of e Shuttle Discovery on flight STS-116 scheduled for the night of Thursday 7 to Friday 8 December at 01:38 GMT (02:38 CET) at the earliest, ESA astronaut Christer Fuglesang of Sweden is set to become the first citizen of a Nordic country to fly to the International e Station.

Fuglesang is currently undergoing intensive training at NASA's Johnson e Center in Houston to prepare for the mission.

In 1992 Christer Fuglesang was chosen as a crew member of the STS-116 e Shuttle mission to the International e Station, which is now scheduled for launch in December 2006.

Fuglesang started training at Star City cosmonaut training centre near Moscow, Russia, in 1993. It was here he first met fellow ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter, whom he will bring back from the ISS in December. At Star City he learned how to operate the Soyuz ecraft, but the toughest part of the training was to learn the Russian language.



Astronaut Christer Fuglesang, mission specialist representing the European e Agency (ESA); Image credit: NASA


: At EHAB in Cape Canaveral, Fla., the STS-116 crew takes a break from equipment familiarization to pose for a group photo. From bottom to top are Pilot William Oefelein, Mission Specialists Joan Higginbotham, Nicholas Patrick, Robert Curbeam, Christer Fuglesang and Sunita Williams, and Commander Mark Polansky. The Swedish Fuglesang represents the European e Agency. Mission crews make frequent trips to the e Coast to become familiar with the equipment and payloads they will be using. STS-116 will be mission number 20 to the International e Station and construction flight 12A.1. The mission payload is the EHAB module, the P5 integrated truss structure and other key components. Launch is scheduled for no earlier than Dec. 7. Photo credit: NASA/George Shelton; caption: NASA

Flight STS-116 is a very demanding undertaking and begins a series of complex missions scheduled to complete the construction of the e Station. Two days after launch, Discovery will dock with the ISS and the seven Shuttle crew members will ingress into the Station. They will be welcomed by the three resident astronauts from the Expedition 14 crew, which includes ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter of Germany, who has been onboard since July.

The mission's main objectives are to attach the P5 connector element of the integrated truss structure to the Station and to connect the power from two large electricity-generating solar array panels already onboard since September. The solar array panels will provide a permanent supply of electricity for the ISS, which has been running on a temporary electrical power system since it went into orbit in 1998.

During the twelve-day mission, Christer Fuglesang and his NASA counterpart Robert Curbeam will carry out two extra-vehicular activities (EVAs or ewalks). During the first, the P5 truss structure will be installed. The main task during the second EVA is to rewire the power system for one half of the Station. The other half of the power system will be rewired during the third EVA, carried out by Robert Curbeam and Sunita Williams. The astronauts will head outside the ISS in their EVA suits and wait for mission control to switch off the ISS power. Once permission has been granted, they will unplug existing cables and plug them into new locations along the ISS.

Christer Fuglesang's mission is called 'Celsius' after Anders Celsius, the inventor of the thermometer. The famous Swedish astronomer had a deep impact on the daily lives of his contemporaries in the 18th Century, just as e exploration is changing the lives of all of us today.

After completing his twelve-day mission, Christer Fuglesang will return to Earth accompanied by Thomas Reiter, who will by then have completed his six-month Astrolab mission onboard the Station.

The Shuttle landing is scheduled for no earlier than 18 December at around 22:04 GMT (23:04 CET) at the Kennedy e Center.

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Endeavour cleared for early arrival home

NASA cleared the shuttle Endeavour for landing on Tuesday (local time), after a two-week mission to the International Space Station (ISS) was cut short 24 hours by menacing Hurricane Dean.

Landing was initially set for Wednesday, but the US space agency rescheduled for a day earlier fearing that its control centre in Houston, Texas may have to be evacuated if it is grazed by Hurricane Dean which is now roaring across the Caribbean.

The hurricane, on track to strike Mexico early Tuesday but missing Texas altogether, "poses little hazard or little risk to the Johnson Space Center mission control area," NASA said in a statement.

Nevertheless, it added: "mission managers continue to monitor Hurricane Dean as it moves westward".

Endeavour is to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, which is not as well equipped as Houston for ground control operations, in the event the Johnson Space Center has to be shut down if the hurricane strikes.

The Endeavour crew will have two chances to land at either 12:32 pm (16:32 GMT) and 2:06 pm (18:06 GMT), NASA said.

The weather forecast for Tuesday at the Cape was relatively dry with any possible showers "probably not expected to be a concern ... so the weather looks good" for a landing, said NASA spokesman Mike Curie in Houston.

Should landing here be called off, the shuttle would try again on Wednesday first at Cape Canaveral, or Edwards Air Force Base in California, or possibly even at the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico.

The Endeavour and ISS crews finished a shortened, fourth spacewalk on Sunday, before the shuttle with its crew of seven undocked from the ISS without performing the usual fly-past of the station to take pictures.

"They didn't do a flight around the ISS because it was a very busy day for the crew, undocking and doing the late inspection, all of this in one day," Mr Curie said.

The crew last week put out a robotic arm with a high-definition camera with attached laser to inspect the heat shield on Endeavour's nose and wings for possible damage from meteors and other floating space debris.

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Crew Completes Spacewalk

For reasons that are not entirely clear to NASA, the space station has tended to drift during spacewalks over the past year or so. The space agency thought the problem might be even worse this time, because one of the gyroscopes that keep the orbiting outpost stable and pointed in the right direction stopped working two weeks ago.

But the space station held steady until the very end of the 4 1/4-hour spacewalk, when it went into a partial, slow-motion cartwheel. The drift lasted far less than the three hours expected.

Flight controllers could have prevented this "free drift" by firing the station's thrusters, but waited to do so until the spacewalkers were out of the way, rather than risk contaminating their spacesuits with toxic rocket fuel.

Right after the spacewalk, one of the two good gyroscopes exhibited a brief but unusually strong vibration. Engineers were keeping close watch over the big spinning wheel, which appeared to be working fine later in the day. Besides the gyroscope that shut down two weeks ago, another broke three years ago.

Laboring 220 miles above Earth, Commander Leroy Chiao and his Russian crewmate, Salizhan Sharipov, plugged in four antennas for a new type of cargo carrier due to fly next year.

They also released by hand a one-foot-long, 11-pound satellite called Nanosputnik, designed for experimental maneuvering by ground controllers.

Sharipov let go of Nanosputnik on the count of two as Chiao photographed the event. "Off it goes," Sharipov said as the satellite floated away with a spin.

During the spacewalk, the space station was empty. With the shuttle fleet grounded since the 2003 Columbia catastrophe, the space station has been home to only two astronauts at a time, instead of the usual three.

Chiao and Sharipov hustled through their work and wrapped everything up more than an hour early, despite extra safety precautions. NASA and the Russian Space Agency instituted the extra measures to avoid a repeat of the problem that occurred during the men's spacewalk in January. Because of a miscommunication during that outing, Chiao got too close to the firing thrusters. This time, the thrusters, which fire automatically when the space station tips out of balance, were disabled for the astronauts' safety.

Engineers have yet to identify the mysterious force that causes the space station to tilt during spacewalks. The space station needs to point in the right direction so that its solar panels continue generating electricity and certain components do not become overheated from exposure to the sun.

The spacewalkers ignored the recent problem that knocked out the gyroscope; visiting shuttle astronauts will tackle that repair job in two months.

The two space station residents have spent the past several weeks dealing with an assortment of breakdowns, including an oxygen generator that still is not working. Over the weekend, they replaced a pump panel that is part of a critical cooling system.

NASA hopes to launch the shuttle Discovery to the space station in mid-May. Technicians had trouble aligning the shuttle and its transporter Monday for the big move from the hangar to the Vehicle Assembly Building, where the booster rockets and redesigned fuel tank are attached. The move was rescheduled for Tuesday.

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