More leak fix work was done to the system during a May 2013 spacewalk by NASA astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn.
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During Friday’s spacewalk, expected to last for 6½ hours, astronauts Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren will work on the space station’s ammonia cooling system. He’s wearing a suit marked with red stripes and his helmet camera shows No. 17 in the lower-right corner.
Station commander Scott Kelly snaps a “selfie” outside the worldwide Space Station during an October 28 spacewalk.
This time, the spacewalkers will have to deal with a highly toxic substance outside the global Space Station.
Four other astronauts are on board for the typical six months: Lindgren along with a Japanese and two other Russians.
“The training we do in the NBL is terrific, and I think when you’ve run in the pool as many times as we have already a lot of that muscle memory and eye-hand coordination comes back very quickly”, Lindgren said. That leak was ultimately isolated in a different system, and the crew will thus power the idled component back up, top it off with new ammonia coolant, and retract and stow a back-up truss that had been filling in.
Kelly and Lindgren kept a close lookout for any ammonia flakes that might escape and contaminate their suits.
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On November 2, NASA and its worldwide partners celebrated 15 continuous years of human occupancy aboard the research laboratory orbiting 250 miles overhead.
