Re: EVA on canadarm and other issues

[Joshua Nicholson <furtim@xxxxxx>]

Chris Van den Bossche wrote:

> -It is apparently impossible to grapple the carina satellite with the 
> canadarm, although the config file says " SAT_GRAPPLED 1" the 
> satellite stays in free floating mode. It is also not possible to stow 
> the sattelite back in its cradle for return to Earth. (After jettison, 
> I got it back in the cradle using only the Atlantis RCS system but the 
> sat did not "lock in") Would be nice to be able to rendez-vous with 
> Carina using Atlantis, grapple the sat with Canadarm, stow it in the 
> cradle and bring it back home. 

I find that it's possible to grapple the sattelite before jettison in 
this scenario, but not after jettison. Furthermore, it seems that if you 
grapple it, move it, and ungrapple it without jettisoning, the sattelite 
remains locked it its position relative to the shuttle. You can rotate 
the shuttle and the sat will rotate around the shuttle's CoG at the same 
time. And if you try to jettison the sattelite from the arm, it 
reappears in the docking bay first and then jettisons normally, but you 
can't grapple it to position it where you want. This seems like a really 
big problem to me, but don't ask me what's causing it.

> -The original ISS resupply mission scenario crashes on startup with a 
> null-pointer error. (i use windows XP pro)
> I modified the scenario to start with focus on the other ship, landed 
> on earth, then i changed manually to the STS-110. It worked then. 
> Grappling works here, but apparently the MPLM module is always locked 
> with Atlantis, it can even stay firmly afloat above the Shuttle when 
> re-entering... 

Yeah, this is what I was talking about above. It seems that the the 
sattelites you grapple can't be released directly from the arm into free 
orbit. That's really a shame, because the working arm is simply a 
fantastic feature of the new version.

Joshua Nicholson


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