Second Spacewalk To Replace Coolant Pump Complete
Houston TX (SPX) Aug 12, 2010 Expedition 24 Flight Engineers Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson have completed the second of three spacewalks to remove the failed ammonia coolant Pump Module on the S1 truss of the International Space Station that failed July 31. Their spacewalk ended at 3:53 p.m. EDT Wednesday. Wheelock successfully closed the quick disconnect valve for the final fluid connector for the failed ammonia pump module. Then he successfully detached the final fluid line from the failed ammonia pump module. Caldwell Dyson disconnected five electrical and data cables while Wheelock broke torque and removed four bolts from the old pump. The pump module then was extracted from the truss through the use of a grapple bar and installed on a payload bracket on the Mobile Base System on the station's truss. With the failed pump module safely stowed on the truss, Caldwell Dyson 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. 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 sciences 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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