Report #56, 3 p.m. CST, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2005
With their first
spacewalk behind them, the residents of the international space
station pressed ahead this week to prepare for several upcoming
milestones.
Expedition 12 Commander Bill McArthur and Flight Engineer Valery
Tokarev will get a special musical wakeup call this weekend as Paul
McCartney connects with them live from a concert in Anaheim, Calif.
The call will take place at 11:55 p.m. CST Saturday and will be
broadcast live on NASA Television.
The McCartney wakeup music for McArthur and Tokarev is a
follow-up to a tribute he paid to the crew of Space Shuttle
Discovery during the STS-114 mission in August, when the
Beatles’ classic “Good Day Sunshine” was played
as a wakeup call for Discovery’s crew on the day weather
conditions became favorable for landing.
McArthur and Tokarev spent the week servicing the spacesuits
they wore Monday for a 5 hour, 22 minute excursion outside the
station. During the spacewalk, they installed a television camera,
jettisoned an inactive science experiment and removed and replaced
other equipment on the truss system of the complex.
The crew's second
spacewalk is planned for Dec. 7. McArthur and Tokarev will don
Russian Orlan spacesuits and exit the Pirs Docking Compartment
airlock for that excursion. During the spacewalk, they will move a
cargo crane adapter, collect science experiments from the hull of
the Zvezda Service Module and manually launch an expired Russian
spacesuit equipped with amateur radio equipment. Called SuitSat,
the experiment is designed to see if ham radio contacts can be made
with a free-flying transmitter.
To prepare for that spacewalk, McArthur and Tokarev will
relocate their Soyuz spacecraft from the Pirs docking port to the
nadir docking port of the Zarya module on Nov. 18, briefly leaving
the station unoccupied.
Earlier today, four thruster engines on the ISS Progress 19
resupply craft were fired for more than 33 minutes in two separate
reboost maneuvers to raise the altitude of the outpost. The station
is now in a near circular orbit of 219 statute miles to accommodate
the launch and docking of the next Progress cargo ship in December.
The reboost was the longest ever completed using Progress
engines.
On Wednesday, Tokarev replaced a control panel for the
station’s toilet in Zvezda that had malfunctioned earlier in
the week. The temporary loss of the use of the device's liquid
disposal component had no impact on station operations. Following
the troubleshooting, the toilet is now operating normally.