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Resupplying the Space Station

Although installing the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS) is the major goal of STS-100, Chris Hadfield and his crewmates have several other important tasks to accomplish during the mission, including installing new equipment and resupplying the Station.

Two of these tasks will be done by Hadfield and his partner, American astronaut Scott Parazynski, during their second spacewalk. Hadfield will do some "rock climbing" up the side of the Station to relocate a previously-installed antenna. "It’s about the size of a car tire and it’s on the side of the Station," he said. "The Canadarm can’t reach it, so we have to do it with tethers. It’s a lot like rock climbing and we even use rock climbing terms."

The astronauts must also transfer another piece of equipment, an electrical switching unit, from the Shuttle to the outside of the Station. This will be done by Parazynski standing on the end of the Canadarm.

The logistics of this operation would bring the Canadarm too close to the newly-installed SSRMS so the Station arm will be pressed into action to perform its first operation: it will be used to move its pallet out over the left wing of the Shuttle to get it out of the way. The pallet, a metal cradle in which the SSRMS was launched, had previously been lifted out of the Shuttle’s cargo bay and placed on the Station’s external truss.

Between the spacewalks and the SSRMS operations, the Shuttle astronauts will also be busy transferring cargo to the Station from the Rafaello Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM). Rafaello is one of three Italian-built modules (the other two are Leonardo and Donatello) that will be used to transport tons of equipment to and from the Station. Hadfield describes it as "a huge suitcase."

The Canadarm will be used to pluck the MPLM from the Shuttle’s payload bay and dock it to the Station. Unlike the Shuttle hatch, Rafaello’s hatch is large enough to transfer the racks that will be used to house scientific experiments on the Station.

Hadfield and his crewmates will get a chance to visit the Station when they help the Station crew—Americans Susan Helms and Jim Voss and Russian Yury Usachev—transfer new equipment from Rafaello and put used equipment and "trash" to the logistics module for return to Earth. The astronauts living on the Station will be the second resident crew, who arrived on a March Shuttle flight for a four-month stay.