KSC-05-S-00049

How does the Remote Manipulator System work on the Space Shuttle? The Remote Manipulator System is made for us by our friends in Canada, and we use that in the Space Shuttle for a lot of varied things. We can use it to grab and deploy satellites, or as well as to give astronauts an access platform or a work platform when they're doing work somewhere inside the orbiter. Now what you'll see when we open the payload bay doors in the orbiter, there on the port side will be the Canadian robot arm, and it has a shoulder and an elbow and a wrist, and it can move in all those joints. And what we'll do is we deploy it up, we can grab a payload that's sitting in the payload bay and set it up above the orbiter, let go and leave it up in space. Or we can grab a satellite that's already up there with the robot arm and bring it down and sit it in the payload bay and work on it there, such as the Hubble Space Telescope has been done a couple of times. Now over on the starboard side of the orbiter is the Orbiter Boom Sensor System, or the OBSS, as we call it. It looks a lot like the robot arm but it doesn't have any moving joints like the RMS does. What you'll see when we get up on orbit is that the RMS will actually lift up out of its cradle. It will reach over and grab the OBSS, pick it up and then use it to do inspections of the tile on the bottom side of the orbiter, as well as the leading-edge Reinforced Carbon-Carbon (or RCC) panels. And that is how we use the RMS and the OBSS on the Shuttle.