One year of Columbus Operations and First Experience with 6 Persons Crew

Kurzfassung

On 12 February 2009 the first year of operation of the Columbus Module was passed. These 12 months of Columbus in orbit have shown a lot of successes of the whole Columbus operation teams but also has shown some open topics which have already been addressed to ensure a long-term operation of Columbus. In the first year 4 NASA racks were successfully relocated from Destiny module to the Columbus, reactivated and used by NASA for various experiments with support from Col-CC and other European centres. The first Columbus software transition in space from Cycle 10 to Cycle 11 to be compatible with the NASA R7 software upgrade has been performed smoothly in August 2008. Many European experiments performed by the USOCs like WAICOI (in the Biolab rack), Geoflow (in the FSL rack) and SOLO (using European, US and Russian assets) have been successfully supported by Columbus Flight Control Team (Col-FCT).