NASA PAO confirmed that extra day of docked operations.

Final OK for shuttle health to come on Monday.

The adidtional transfers will consist mostly of spare parts in the shuttle.
For instance, spare ink cartridges for printers, and if I heard correctly, one
printer. Also, various power cables ( I assume whatever is compatible between
shuttle and station)

Oh, one more item mentioned: some washcloths and towels would be moved to station.

My guess is that they will essentially cannabalise the shuttle's on-board
spare parts inventory and move that to station to help station sustain another
long period of no shuttle visits.

(I wonder if they have any spare laptops they could leave on station, or if
all laptops in shuttle are still required at one point between undocking and landing.)

Another aspect: for some kits in MPLM, they will now take the time to extract
some items and test them before discarding the part they are meant to replace
(for instance, O2 masks). As a result, some procedures have already been
changed to extract certain components from bags as before they are stowed
somewhere in the station and place them in an obvious spot which will make its
testing faster/easier on that extra day.


While I think the extra day is nice and probably very welcome from both crews,
my gut tells me that the real reason for extension was to give engineers on
ground more time to study the shuttle imaging. They've given tiles a good
score card, but final decision on whether RCC surfaces are OK isn't yet taken.

There is only so many spare parts on the shuttle they can transfer over to the
station without affecting the shuttle's operation, and only so many spares
that are compatible with station systems.


Would they leave the EVA suits and SAFER units on the station ? Is SAFER
"field rechargeable" or must it absolutely be refilled with nasty chemicals on
the ground ?


One more thing mentioned: As the station grows once/id construction is
restarted , the CMG redundancy will diminish since more CMGs are required to
handle the greater mass. And for periods of asymetric configs during truss
assembly, a minimum of 4 working CMGs are required.

I suspect NASA will want to do a post mortem on the failed CMG ASAP so it can
determine of the 3 others are likely to fail and thus start to plan some cargo
capacity for shipping spare CMGs to the station. Once construction of truss
commences, failure of a CMG would be quite a big deal. Having a spare one up
there already would allow the 2 station occupants to do an EVA and replace it
before the next shuttle flight.