I’ve talked about last week’s Track & Capture class with Butch in the L-473 logbook.
In fact, I’ll have another such class coming up next week, in which I’ll have a chance to practice coordination and communication with a different crew-mate: Terry.
With all this Track & Capture training in the simulators I’ve been curious to see how the real hardware looks like, so I’ve taken a look at the pictures from last week’s grapple of HTV4 by Karen Nyberg and Chris Cassidy. I really like these two close-ups taken before and after capture.
In the “before” pictures, the longer pin you see sticking out of the grapple fixture is the grapple pin: the snares of the arm end effector close around it when we squeeze the trigger – assuming of course that we are in the grapple envelope.
The white line and circle with the shorter pin sticking out is the visual target that we see in the end effector camera. You can see that the pin has a white dot in the center: when we observe the white dot inside the white circle in the camera view, we know that we have a sufficiently good alignment in pitch and yaw.
In the “after” picture you can probably recognize the end effector camera, facing straight down onto the target pin.
Grapple point. Credits: NASA
Canadarm 2 capturing HTV. Credits: NASA
17/08/2013