Recherche

The seven astronauts* on the Space Shuttle Discovery for the "Esperia" mission delivered Node 2/Harmony to the International Space Station and have now returned to the laboratories where the Node was originally manufactured, at Thales Alenia Space in Turin.

Their story began last October, when the STS 120 mission (named Esperia in honor of Italy) was launched from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Italy played a lead role in the mission: in addition to providing Node 2, Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli participated in the mission on behalf of ESA (European Space Agency).

Mission STS 120 involved one of the most important and complex steps in the ISS assembly process. With the installation of Node 2, the Space Station becomes truly International. It also required extensive and unplanned extravehicular activities, including the repair of a solar panel (Solar Array SE). This is a key to making full use of the two scientific laboratory modules, Columbus from Europe and Kibo from Japan, which will be added to the ISS on future missions.

It is not by chance that the astronauts are starting their tour of Italy in Turin (Piedmont region). For more than thirty years Turin has been a world center of excellence for the construction of space infrastructures. Thales Alenia Space's Turin facilities have manufactured more than half of the International Space Station's pressurized modules, the habitable part of the space station.

Node 2 is a critical structure linking the Space Station's different scientific laboratories. ESA chose Italian space agency ASI to manage development of this node, including the Thales Alenia Space-led production team. The Multiuse Pressurized Logistic Modules (MPLM), named Leonardo, Raffaello and Donatello, were also built in Turin on behalf of ASI. Working for ESA, Thales Alenia Space's Turin facilities built Node 3 (which the astronauts visited in the clean room at Thales Alenia Space), the Automatic Transfer Vehicle (ATV), which will transport fuel, air and water to the International Space Station, a large part of the Columbus scientific laboratory for research in microgravity environments and the Cupola, a special "observation window" for the station.

This year will be a very busy one for the International Space Station. The Columbus laboratory and the ATV cargo vessel are scheduled for launch early this year, and both were in large part built by Thales Alenia Space's Italian teams in Turin.

* Pamela Melroy, George Zamka, Scott Parazynski, Stephanie Wilson, Doug Wheelock, Paolo Nespoli, Clay Anderson