Light-Duty Day For Crew After Wednesday's Spacewalk
Houston TX (SPX) Aug 13, 2010 After the completion of a successful seven-hour, 26-minute spacewalk Wednesday, the Expedition 24 crew members aboard the International Space Station enjoyed some off-duty time, conducted some routine maintenance and participated in a debrief with spacewalk specialists Thursday. During Wednesday's spacewalk, Flight Engineers Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson removed the failed ammonia coolant Pump Module on the S1 truss that failed July 31 and installed it on a payload bracket on the Mobile Base System on the station's truss. With the failed pump module safely stowed on the truss, the pair prepared the spare pump for installation on the next spacewalk targeted for no earlier than Monday. A fourth spacewalk may be required to clean up the work site. Meanwhile, Commander Alexander Skvortsov and Flight Engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Mikhail Kornienko were busy in the Russian segment of the station Thursday with a variety of routine maintenance activities and science experiments. Flight Engineer Shannon Walker was busy in the Tranquility module conducting maintenance work on the station's Water Recovery System which provides clean water by reclaiming wastewater, including urine and cabin humidity condensate. Walker, Wheelock and Caldwell Dyson participated in a debrief with specialists to set the stage for the third spacewalk, scheduled for Monday. In response to the power reconfiguration steps last weekend, the science team worked quickly to establish a plan to preserve experiment samples in the Japanese Experiment Module freezer. The on-orbit crew was able to transfer all the samples from the freezer in the Kibo laboratory to an operating freezer. No science samples were lost due to the pump module anomaly. While the crew schedule has been interrupted to support the newly added spacewalks, the payload ground teams have been working closely with mission controllers to preserve and re-plan high priority activities. Other activities that can be rescheduled with little or no impact are being postponed to a later date.
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Astronauts remove failed cooling pump in ISS spacewalk Washington (AFP) Aug 11, 2010 Astronauts from the International Space Station on Wednesday removed a failed ammonia pump from the outside of the orbiting spaceship during a second spacewalk to fix the station's cooling system. "The work has gone extremely well today," NASA said after astronauts Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson wrapped up work on the exterior of the ISS, some 350 kilometers (217 miles) above the Ear ... read more |
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