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Astronauts Open ISS Station Room
mikesd81 notes an ABC News report that astronauts aboard the ISS have opened the new station room. Commander Peggy Whitson and astronaut Paolo Nespoli delayed their lunch so the event could happen before the station's orbit temporarily blocked the ability to send a video downlink to Mission Control. From the article: "Nespoli... joined Discovery's crew to personally deliver the Italian-made pressurized chamber... Astronauts added the school bus-sized room called Harmony during a 6.5-hour spacewalk Friday, using a robotic arm to lift it from the shuttle's cargo bay and install it on the station. The compartment will serve as the docking port and nerve center for European and Japanese laboratories that will be delivered on the next three shuttle flights. It also will be a power and thermal distribution center, providing air, electricity, water and other systems for the space station. Racks of computer and electronic equipment are already inside the cylinder, which will double as a living space for the crew... The astronauts will have to undo more than 700 bolts [which held down the equipment during flight] to free up the equipment."
That's not an interesting observation since the astronauts don't perceive the gravitational field. And sure, there is a barely measurable tidal force (the gradient of the gravitational field), but again astronauts do not perceive it directly. Finally, the killer argument to all this is the observation that the space station doesn't orient itself with respect to the Earth. The effect of the Earth's gravitational field on the orientation of the ISS is negligiable. The only thing that is deliberately moved as the station orbits around the Earth are the solar cells. And they are kept oriented towards the Sun. This means that the gravitational gradient of the Earth rotates around the astronaut as the ISS orbits. So that gradient cannot be a useful definition of "up" since it never stays put with respect to either the station and the astronaut.