STS-105 Status Report #14 – 17 Aug 2001 – 5:30 AM CDT

The ten astronauts
and cosmonauts aboard Discovery and the International Space Station
will focus on transfer activities today, continuing to place equipment,
discarded items and belongings of the Expedition Two crew aboard the
Multi-Purpose Logistics Module Leonardo for return to Earth.

Expedition Two
Commander Yury Usachev and Flight Engineers Jim Voss and Susan Helms
will continue handover briefings with the Expedition Three crew. The
new station commander, Frank Culbertson, and Russian cosmonauts Mikhail
Tyurin and Vladimir Dezhurov have taken up residence aboard the station.
The Expedition Two crewmembers, who spent more than five months on the
station, will return home aboard Discovery next week.

Aboard Discovery,
Commander Scott Horowitz, Pilot Rick Sturckow, and Mission Specialists
Pat Forrester and Dan Barry, along with the Expedition Two crewmembers,
were awakened at 4:10 a.m. Central time to the sounds of “Time Bomb”,
a song performed for Forrester by his sons, Patrick and Andrew.

On the heels of
their successful space walk yesterday to install an ammonia coolant
reservoir and a suite of experiments on the station, Barry and Forrester
will be reviewing procedures and will check out hardware for the mission’s
second space walk on Saturday to hook up heater cables for a truss structure
to be delivered to the station next year

Horowitz and Sturckow
will perform the mission’s second reboost of the station this morning,
this one to raise the ISS’ altitude by about two statute miles. The
three Russian crewmembers aboard the shuttle/station complex will field
questions from Russian reporters at the Russian Mission Control Center
outside Moscow at 11:15 a.m. Central time. Three hours later, at 2:15
p.m., all ten crewmembers will hold a news conference with U.S. reporters
at NASA centers. At 3 p.m., the crewmembers will gather for a change
of command ceremony on the station as Expedition Two Commander Usachev
passes the baton to Expedition Three Commander Culbertson. The formal
handover of command actually occurred late Monday afternoon after the
crews exchanged custom-made Soyuz seat liners for the return capsule
docked to the station.

Discovery and the
station are orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes at an average altitude
of 244 statute miles with systems functioning well. The next status
report will be issued about 6 p.m., or earlier, if events warrant.