Moving day aboard the International Space Station

9 a.m. CDT Thursday, April 8, 2010

Mission Control Center, Houston, Texas

STS-131 MCC Status Report #07 HOUSTON – It was moving day aboard the International Space Station as the Leonardo Multipurpose Logistics Module was relocated from Discovery’s payload bay to a port on the Harmony node at 11:24 Wednesday night.

The Italian-built module’s more than 17,000 pounds of cargo includes four experiment racks along with the final private crew quarters. This is the final roundtrip to the station for the 21-foot-long, 15-foot-diameter Leonardo. Once back on Earth, the module will be reconfigured with increased shielding on the outside for the STS-133 mission in September when it will be left on the station as a permanent module.

Crew members continued the transfer of items from Discovery’s middeck to the station and configured the Quest airlock module for the first of three planned spacewalks, scheduled to begin Friday morning at about 12:40. Discovery Mission Specialists Rick Mastracchio and Clayton Anderson will serve as the spacewalk team for all three.

Thursday morning, shuttle Pilot James P. Dutton Jr. joined Mastracchio and Anderson to review procedures for the first spacewalk of the mission. Anderson and Mastracchio will end their day preparing for Friday morning’s spacewalk by camping overnight in Quest.

They will spend tonight in Quest, sealed off from the rest of the station, at a reduced atmospheric pressure. That will purge nitrogen from their bloodstreams as a measure against suffering from decompression sickness during the spacewalk.

Earlier today, shuttle crew members Alan G. Poindexter, Mastracchio and Stephanie Wilson talked about the mission with the Tom Joyner Radio Show in Dallas, WVIT-TV in Hartford, Conn., and Fox News Radio. Mastracchio is from Connecticut.

The 13 crew members of the joint shuttle and station will go to bed about noon and be awakened by Mission Control at 7:51 Thursday evening.