International Space Station Science Operations Status Report #3 – 12 Mar 2001

After a quiet weekend, the Payload Operations Center is preparing to support
several activities this week. The focus of this week will be transferring
science experiments and other equipment from the Multi-Purpose Logistics
Module, known as Leonardo, to the International Space Station.

Overnight, the crew attached Leonardo, the first of three logistics modules
developed by the Italian Space Agency and managed by the Marshall Space
Flight Center Flight Projects Directorate in Huntsville, Ala., to the
Destiny Laboratory Module. Randy McClendon, the lead manager for the
logistics module at the Marshall Center, is supporting the mission at the
Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Leonardo contains more than five tons of equipment and experiments that will
be unloaded during the next few days. Among those items is the first
rack-sized facility that will be installed in Destiny – the Human Research
Facility. This floor-to-ceiling rack is about the size of a large
refrigerator and supports a variety of experiments dedicated to studying how
space flight affects human physiology.

Editor’s Note:

The Payload Operations Center at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in
Huntsville, Ala., manages all science research experiments aboard the
International Space Station. The center is also home for coordination of the
mission-planning work of a variety of international sources, all science
payload deliveries and retrieval, and payload training and payload safety
programs for the Station crew and all ground personnel.