ISS - Expedition 38 Mission patch.
Dec. 26, 2013
With a new ammonia pump module installed during a Christmas Eve spacewalk operating properly, the International Space Station’s Expedition 38 crew spent Thursday cleaning up U.S. spacesuit systems and tools and completing preparations for an unrelated Russian spacewalk on Friday.
Flight controllers in Houston’s Mission Control successfully restarted the new pump Tuesday night following two spacewalks – including a 7-hour, 30-minute excursion Tuesday -- by Flight Engineers Rick Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins to replace a degraded pump module on the station’s starboard truss.
Image above: Flight Engineers Rick Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins work with spacesuits and spacewalk equipment of the International Space Station's Quest airlock Thursday. Image Credit: NASA TV.
Read more about the Dec. 24 spacewalk: http://www.orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2013/12/spacewalkers-complete-installation-of.html
Read more about the Dec. 22 spacewalk: http://www.orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2013/12/spacewalkers-remove-degraded-ammonia.html
Early on Christmas Day, the heat exchangers for the Destiny laboratory, the Harmony and Tranquility nodes and the Japanese Kibo laboratory were reintegrated to enable experiments racks and other systems affected by the partial Cooling Loop A shutdown Dec. 11 to come back on line. The Columbus laboratory heat exchanger will remain down until the European Space Agency, at its own request, conducts that module’s integration next week when personnel return from the holiday.
Mastracchio and Hopkins began their Thursday with a round of post-spacewalk medical exams conducted by Flight Engineer Koichi Wakata, who served as the robotics operator for the two spacewalks.
Afterward, Mastracchio and Hopkins focused on scrubbing the cooling loops and refilling the water tanks of the spacesuits they wore Tuesday. The suits functioned perfectly during the spacewalk, remaining dry throughout the excursion.
Image above: NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins participates in the first Expedition 38 spacewalk designed to troubleshoot a faulty coolant pump on the International Space Station. Image Credit: NASA.
The completion of the spacewalk and the successful restart of the ammonia pump module clears the decks for Commander Oleg Kotov and Flight Engineer Sergey Ryazanskiy to conduct their own 7-hour spacewalk Friday out of the Pirs docking compartment. Their work is not related to the two U.S. spacewalks to replace the faulty ammonia coolant pump.
Kotov and Ryazanskiy, in Russian Orlan spacesuits, will exit the Pirs airlock at 8 a.m. EST Friday to install a pair of high-fidelity cameras on the Zvezda service module as part of a Canadian commercial endeavor designed to downlink Earth observation imagery. The two spacewalking cosmonauts also will refresh several experiment packages on the exterior of the Russian segment of the station.
Russian Spacewalk at Space Station
Kotov and Ryazanskiy spent Thursday preparing equipment inside the Pirs airlock and later joined Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin for a final review of spacewalk procedures.
NASA Television will air live coverage of Friday’s spacewalk beginning at 7:30 a.m. This will be the 177th spacewalk in support of space station assembly and maintenance, and the 11th this year.
NASA TV: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv
For more information about the Space Station (ISS), visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html
Images (mentioned), Video, Text, Credit: NASA / NASA TV.
Best regards, Orbiter.ch
