Commander Alan Poindexter led the STS-131 mission to the International Space Station aboard space shuttle Discovery. James P. Dutton Jr. served as the pilot. Mission Specialists were Rick Mastracchio, Clayton Anderson, Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Stephanie Wilson and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Naoko Yamazaki.
Discovery delivered a multi-purpose logistics module filled with science racks that were transferred to laboratories on the International Space Station.
The mission featured three spacewalks performed by Mastracchio and Anderson. They replaced an ammonia tank assembly, retrieved a Japanese experiment from the station’s exterior and switched out a rate gyro assembly on the S0 element of the station’s truss.