NASA’s yearlong spaceman, Scott Kelly, is taking his first spacewalk just hours before setting a new US flight record.
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Two astronauts on board the worldwide Space Station have taken their first spacewalk outside – to do a few repairs and maintenance.
Kelly, spaceflight veteran on a year-long gig at the ISS, was shown on a live NASA Television broadcast as he embarked on the very first spacewalk of his career, joined by flight engineer and colleague Lindgren.
“When living in a place isolated from the rest of the world like here aboard the worldwide Space Station, (music) becomes more significant”, he wrote.
The current record is 215 days. On Earth, scientists will perform parallel studies on Kelly’s identical twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly. Kelly removed insulation from a failed main bus switching unit, which controls the power sent from solar panels to the station, so it can be robotically removed later.
Kelly and Lindgren are slated for a second outing on November 6 to reconfigure one of the station’s cooling systems. He covered the device with a thermal blanket, which will help it run cooler and extend its life. (NASA astronaut Terry Virts lubricated other joints in February.) Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui helped Kelly throughout the hours-long task by maneuvering the arm from inside the space station.
Wednesday’s mission was delayed slightly after Lindgren inadvertently switched on the water flow in his suit too soon.
Kelly has been aboard the orbiting lab since March of this year.
That 215-day record – more than seven months – was set in 2007.
“We haven’t been able to do everything we hoped we would”, Station operations integration manager Kenneth Todd said last week.
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In a phone call last week, Obama told Kelly that his feat is “nothing to sneeze at”. He spent 437 days aboard the Russian space station Mir in 1994 and 1995.
