Two US. astronauts went for a spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Thursday to pack up a spare cooling radiator and install a high-definition television camera outside the orbiting laboratory, a NASA TV broadcast showed. Retracting this radiator was the primary task of today’s spacewalk.
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But it could also have one more use.
But the TTCR was re-extended in 2012 as part of an effort to pinpoint an ammonia coolant leak. However, the leak was later found elsewhere and has since been repaired.
“We developed protocols and included additional hardware to try to address any potential issues that may come up, but until you actually execute your process, it’s hard to know what to fully expect”, Kristen John, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, told the Monitor in an email.
Hopefully, Williams and Rubins can get the radiator fully retracted and covered this time around. They were helped back inside the station by Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin.
The two astronauts also installed a new docking port during a spacewalk August 19th.
Using a pistol-grip tool similar to a power drill used on Earth, Williams initiated the retraction under Rubins’ close watch.
A team of scientists led by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) analysed the data sent from the ISS, and compared it to identical samples sequenced in the lab on Earth. Selected for the NASA astronaut class in 1996, the West Point graduate and retired United States Army colonel has taken four spaceflights, three trips to the ISS, and has extensive spacewalk experience.
The key here is that with this success, NASA has demonstrated that it is possible to sequence DNA in a moving spacecraft – something that may be done one day on a spacecraft other than the International Space Station.
The crewmembers cleaned up their worksites and safely returned to the inside of the space station at 2:41 p.m. EDT (1841 GMT). Spacewalkers have now spent a total of 1,217 hours and 34 minutes working outside the station.
It was the second spacewalk for Rubins.
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Jeffrey Nels Williams (born January 18, 1958) is a retired United States Army officer and a NASA astronaut. Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka holds the world record with 878 days in space.
