NASA STS-115 MCC Status Report #16

2 a.m. CDT Sunday, Sept. 17, 2006
Mission Control Center, Houston, Texas

It’s undocking day. The Space Shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to begin moving away from the International Space Station at 7:50 a.m. CDT.

Crew members will get a look at the results of their STS-115 mission, which resumed assembly of the station. They’ll do a full fly-around, the first in four years, to photograph the station with its new truss segments and solar arrays.

Before undocking, the STS-115 crew — Commander Brent Jett, Pilot Chris Ferguson and Mission Specialists Dan Burbank, Joe Tanner, Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper and Steve MacLean — will say farewell to Expedition 13 — Commander Pavel Vinogradov, and Flight Engineers Jeff Williams and Thomas Reiter — about 5 a.m. before closing the hatches between the two vehicles.

Then, with Ferguson at the controls, Atlantis will slowly move away from the station. The fly-around is scheduled to start at about 8:15 a.m. Atlantis is to leave the area a little after 9:30 a.m.

Meanwhile, on the ground, preparations are under way for the launch of the next inhabitants of the station. The Expedition 14 crew, Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin, and spaceflight participant Anousheh Ansari, are scheduled to launch in their Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 11:09 p.m. CDT. They are scheduled to dock with the orbital laboratory two days later. NASA TV coverage of the Expedition 14 pre-launch activities and launch begins at 10:30 p.m.

The shuttle and station crews woke at 11:15 p.m. to “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins, played for Ferguson. In his reply, Ferguson thanked soon-to-retire STS-115 lead guidance, navigation and control flight controller Charles Alford for his 40 years of NASA service. The shuttle pilot also thanked all those in Mission Control for helping to make spaceflight possible.

The next STS-115 mission status report will be issued Sunday afternoon, or earlier if events warrant.