spacetoday.net: Shuttle prepares to undock from station

Posted: Sat, Jun 15, 2002, 9:00 AM ET (1300 GMT)
STS-111 view of Leonardo module (NASA)

The crew of the space shuttle Endeavour completed preparations Friday to leave the International Space Station as engineers worked to troubleshoot a new problem with the station's robot arm. After astronauts finished packing the Leonardo cargo module with equipment and garbage to return to Earth, the module was detached from the station and stowed in Endeavour's cargo bay Friday afternoon. Endeavour is scheduled to undock from the station at 10:32 am EDT (1432 GMT) Saturday, and will land back in Florida at 1 pm EDT (1700 GMT) Monday. While preparations to undock from the station continued, engineers on the ground worked on a problem with the Canadarm2 robot arm that is preventing it from drawing power from the new mobile base station attached to the railcar on the ISS's truss. Engineers believe that the problem is a minor software bug that can be fixed by uploading new software, and that the arm should be ready to transition to the base station by July 1, as currently scheduled.