Space station spacemen make hazardous spacewalk
Ness CANAVERAL, Everglade State The infinite station’s two American cosmonauts went out on a riskier-than-usual spacewalk Wednesday to furbish up one of two equipment failures that have stultified their power scheme and threatened to procrastinate construction.
Commandant Peggy Whitson and Daniel Tani superceded a motor needful to lean a solar wing toward the Sun, taking extra guards to fend off being aghast. As before long as the new motor was aquiline up, electrical energy began fluxing through the unit of measurement.
“Yee-haw! Class,” Whitson informated.
NASA held off on announcing success as flight accountants tested the motor via anchorred commands.
The leaning mechanism stopped up working in early December, infuriating a powerfulness problem that grew three calendar months earlier when a solar wing going around joint packed up and had got to be shut down.
Wednesday’s spacewalk was specially hazardous because of the hazard of being appalled. For refuge, Whitson and Tani held off until the international space station was on the dark side of Earth, then cautiously undid fixings and staccato cables, and drew out the old electric motor.
A few proceedings later, the spacewalkers popped in the new 200-pound-plus motor, a spare that had got been stacked away on board. “We’re all respiring down here. Thanks a great deal,” Mission Control emphasised.
Whitson and Tani executed virtually the entire job in the dark of dark, pausing during the daylight swings about Earth when 160 volts of electrical energy would course through the cablegrams. As an supplied precaution, the spacewalkers were well not to indicate any nonessential lights at the solar wing in question to foreclose power contemporaries.
Because the motor serves as the geomorphologic backbone for the solar wing, the spacewalkers had to get sure the backstage didn’t come off and fly away.
Earliest in the morn, the spacewalk almost concluded up being abortedded when a radio-relay job prevented Whitson and Tani from getting wind Mission Control. Flight accountants restored communicating through a backup man channel inside 20 proceedings.
With their motor work ruined, the spacewalkers moved over to the discredited solar rotary joint for hitherto another review.
NASA is uncertained what to do about the clotted joint, that is said to incessantly rotate 360 levels to maintain the solar wings showing toward the Sun. As plenty of as four spacewalkss will be needed later this twelvemonth to withdraw metal shaves from the joint and get it doing work again. Shuttle flights could be delayed starting in the autumn, if the joint isn’t rigid.
It was the first spacewalk for Tani since his 90-year-old mother was shot down in a machine accident outside Chicago only before Christmas. Flight managing director Holly Ridings told Tani has existed coping highly well, and that his work has notted been unnatural.
Tani was alleged to render to Earth in December on board Atlantis, but his trip home was delayed because of jobs with the fuel gauges in the shuttle’s external tank. NASA is nowed aiming for a February 7 liftoff after replacement a bad connective at the bottom of the armoured combat vehicle.
The bird will carry up Tani’s replacing, a French cosmonaut, as well as the European scientific discipline lab, Capital of Ohio.
Wednesday’s spacewalk fell on the Eve of the 50th day of remembrance of the launching of NASA’s first satellite, Adventurer 1. The very following day, Friday, will mark the fifth day of remembrance of the Columbia catastrophe.
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