Crew Attaches Japanese Resupply Vehicle to Station

JAXA - HTV-2 Mission patch.

27.01.2011

Expedition 26 Flight Engineers Cady Coleman and Paolo Nespoli used the station’s robotic arm to attach the unpiloted Japanese Kounotori2 H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV2) to the Earth-facing port of the Harmony module of the International Space Station at 9:51 a.m. EST.

The unpiloted Japanese Kounotori2 H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV2) is attached to the Earth-facing port of the Harmony module by the station’s robotic arm. Credit: NASA

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched HTV2 aboard an H-IIB rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan at 12:37 a.m. (2:27 p.m. Japan time) on Saturday.

HTV2 is the second unpiloted cargo ship launched by JAXA to the station and will deliver more than four tons of food and supplies to the station and its crew members.

The crew will open the hatch and begin retrieving the supplies from inside HTV2 at about 7:30 a.m. Friday. In the coming days, a pallet loaded with spare station parts will be extracted from a slot in the cargo ship and attached to an experiment platform outside the Japanese Kibo module. Other cargo will be transferred internally to the station.

HTV-2 cutaway description

The cargo vehicle will be filled with trash, detached from the station and sent to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere at the end of March.

Images, Video, Text, Credits: NASA / Roscosmos / JAXA.

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