Astronauts Have A Busy Month Ahead

NASA tells ANN that International Space Station Commander Mike Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineer Sunita Williams wound up a 7-hour 55-minute spacewalk at 6:09 pm EST Wednesday. It was the first of an unprecedented series of planned excursions from the Quest airlock.

Two other spacewalks from Quest will follow. Lopez-Alegria and Williams are scheduled to make the second spacewalk on February 4 and the third for February 8. The first two focus on the reconfiguration of station power and cooling systems to permanent ones.

Lopez-Alegria -- the lead spacewalker wearing the suit with red stripes -- and Williams, in the all-white suit, began the tasks of the first spacewalk by reconfiguring one of the two cooling loops serving Destiny from the temporary to the permanent system.

Working at the "rats’ nest," an area near the base of the Z1 Truss with numerous fluid and electrical connections, Lopez-Alegria reconfigured the fluid loop connections, moving two of the fluid lines from the early system from the lab and connecting them back up to the Z1 panel. That will help enable reactivation of the early cooling system if it should be required.

He also connected a cable for the Space Shuttle Power Transfer System (SSPTS). It will allow power from the station’s solar arrays to be transferred to a docked space shuttle, beginning with STS-118 in June. Williams also reconfigured several electrical connections.

Next the spacewalkers stood by as the ground retracted the starboard radiator of the P6 Truss. After retraction they installed six cable cinches and two winch bars to secure the radiator and then installed a shroud over it.

Lopez-Alegria and Williams then moved to the Early Ammonia Servicer on the P6 Truss. It provided a contingency supply of ammonia for the Early Ammonia System, which is no longer needed now that a permanent cooling system is in place. The spacewalkers removed one of two fluid lines from the servicer, which will be jettisoned this summer. Because of time constraints, the second will be removed on a subsequent spacewalk.

There were some tense moments, as Williams noted near the end of the spacewalk there were four small, frozen "flakes" of ammonia drifting from one of the caps on an old fluid line, and close to where Lopez-Alegria was working. Those flakes could be toxic to an astronaut if they came in contact with them... but fortunately, Williams was "pretty positive" none of the flakes hit her spacewalking partner.

To be sage, both astronauts spent about 25 minutes in a "bakeout," after they re-entered the airlock, to make sure any ammonia flakes had evaporated and cleared the area before the spacewalkers took off their suits.

The three spacewalks from the Quest airlock in US spacesuits, and a Russian spacewalk scheduled for February 22, will be the most ever done by station crew members during a single month. They also will bring to 10 the total number of spacewalks by Lopez-Alegria, an astronaut record. Williams will have a total of four, the most ever by a female astronaut.

There's a reason NASA prefers to group its spacewalks so close together. Starting from scratch, it takes about 100 crewmember hours to prepare for a spacewalk. By doing spacewalks a few days apart, considerable crew time can be saved by not having to repeat some of those preparatory steps.

FMI: www.nasa.gov