ISS during the last shuttle flight in November
It has been an eventful last couple months adjusting to being Texans... Truth be told we miss Colorado and everything that comes with it... Friends and Family, Mountains... and little things like seasons. We have been settling in well though. We have been meeting a lot great people and are starting to settling into a rhythm of life. Lynee has still had a lot of difficulty finding a job. The job market down here has just been terrible. That has not been all bad though, it has caused us to consider different career options that we would probably not have thought about if Lynee was able to just quickly jump into a job. Only time will tell at this point. In other exciting news... well, probably just for us... it has gotten colder in the last couple weeks and has been really pleasant down in H-town. It actually snowed a couple weeks ago... though none of it stuck around us, but still, it did snow.
Most recently I participated in the STS-129 Shuttle mission. I will be training for the foreseeable future and was mostly observing what the certified flight controllers were doing, but I was able to contribute in smaller ways. Such as assisting the certified guys to make sure that the upcoming schedule for the everything going on in the flight looked good and looking for any potential issues. Overall the whole mission was a lot of fun to watch and went incredibly well. There is already a sense of nostalgia developing around Shuttle missions as there less and less of them on the horizon. Here are some pictures of the mission I collected:
Though I am sure it is hard to tell, the main purpose of this Shuttle Mission was to deliver two of these giant "cargo pallets." They basically just hold a bunch of spare parts for the ISS. She's over 10 years old now and things wear out. Some of the pieces (like the gyroscopes that ADCO controls) are very big and heavy (picture your washing machine spinning at a few thousand rpm...) and pose a serious difficulty to repair if they break after the Shuttle retires next October. This pictures shows the ISS robotic arm installing one of the 2 cargo pallets onto the truss for storage. Each pallet has one of the gyroscopes used to control the ISS attitude.
This is just a cool picture I found taken from the Orbiter as it was approaching the ISS. You can see the docking system ready to dock in the foreground. The Orbiter is "underneath" the ISS (between the ISS and the Earth).
This is the ISS how it looks right now with two of the large cargo pallets attached just inside the solar arrays on either side, they stick up and down from the truss.
