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Astronauts take 6.5-hour spacewalk for International Space Station repairs
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(7 months later)
A pair of astronauts floated outside the International Space Station on Tuesday for a planned 6.5-hour spacewalk to perform maintenance work including putting an old cooling pump into storage.
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Flight engineers Reid Wiseman with Nasa and Alexander Gerst with the European Space Agency left the station’s Quest airlock about 8.50am ET, a first spacewalk for both, a Nasa Television broadcast showed.
Their primary goal is to finish work from December to replace a failed ammonia cooling pump.
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The old unit was removed and a spare installed during a pair of spacewalks, but the repair crew ran out of time to put the failed module into storage for possible future repair and reuse.
After gathering tools, Wiseman prepared the intended storage site on one of the station’s external stowage platforms while Gerst attached himself to the end of the station’s 58ft (18m) long robotic arm to move the old pump.
With Nasa crew-mate Butch Wilmore operating the crane from inside the station’s cupola module, Gerst carried the module, which on Earth weighs about 850lbs (385kg), over to its storage site.
“Nice work, nice flying Butch,” NASA astronaut Doug Wheelock from Mission Control in Houston radioed to the crew.
After bolting the module into place, Wiseman and Gerst planned to tackle some electrical work to provide an alternative power source for equipment on the robot arm’s mobile base.
They also will replace a light in a television camera outside the Destiny laboratory module.
A second outing by Wiseman and Wilmore is scheduled for 15 October to replace a failed component in a voltage regulator that is part of the station’s solar power system.
The device failed in May, taking down one of the station’s eight power channels. Wiseman and Wilmore also plan to relocate some camera equipment before a major reconfiguration of station modules next year, intended to prepare berthing spots for new commercial passenger spaceships.
Nasa spacewalks had been on hold, except for critical tasks like the replacing the cooling pump, while engineers evaluated the US spacesuits. Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano nearly drowned when his helmet filled with water during a spacewalk in July 2013.
The station is a $100bn science laboratory owned by 15 nations that flies about 260 miles (418 km) above Earth.
