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发布时间：2006-06-25 09:08     点击：

   Bill Gerstenmaier, the station's program manager, said Discovery will leave the station in much better shape than when it arrived. Water will be left behind, as well as laptops, wash cloths, a printer, dry wipes, floppy disks, food and nitrogen.

  

"We are going to be in very good shape through the end of the year," Gerstenmaier said.    Shuttles are needed for the supplying and continued construction of the station.

   When NASA's shuttles were grounded in 2003, the agency began relying on Russian vehicles to deliver supplies to the station. However, the Russian cargo ship Progress cannot haul the weighty items the shuttle can. The next delivery by Progress is scheduled for September.

   Gerstenmaier said station managers prepared for a scenario in which there would be no shuttle flights this year. Despite that, he said the grounding of future shuttle missions opens the station to risk.

  "We are still susceptible to some large failure of some component that can only be delivered by the shuttle that we don't have a like spare on station," he said.

   Among the tasks Discovery's astronauts performed for the station was the reconfiguring of a gyroscope, which failed in March. Four gyroscopes, each weighing 660 pounds, are intended to steer the station, but only two have been working in recent months.

   On Monday, during their second spacewalk, Discovery astronauts Stephen Robinson and Soichi Noguchi, planned to replace the other failed gyroscope, which has not worked since 2002.

   The pair planned to go over procedures for installing the gyroscope on Sunday with astronaut Andrew Thomas, who was set to direct Monday's replacement.

   As they began spacewalk preparations Sunday, Robinson informed Mission Control's Stephen Frick that things might proceed slower than anticipated.

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