KSC-2012-3839

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a United Space Alliance worker attaches lifting cranes to the container holding the remote manipulator system, or RMS. The RMS will be placed on a flatbed truck for shipment back to the Canadian Space Agency. The RMS, also called the Canadarm, was manufactured for NASA’s Space Shuttle Program by SPAR Aerospace Ltd., which later became a part of MD Robotics in Ontario, Canada. During shuttle missions, the RMS was attached in the payload bay. Mission specialists operated the arm to remove payloads from the payload bay and hand them off to the larger Canadarm 2 on the International Space Station. The shuttle arm also was used during astronaut spacewalks. Photo credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett