ISS - Expedition 54 Mission patch.
January 29, 2018
International Space Station (ISS). Animation Credit: NASA
International Space Station officials have postponed Monday’s (Today) spacewalk to swap latching end effectors (LEEs) on the Canadarm2 robotic arm. The decision was made after the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and its robotics specialist team developed a diagnostics software patch confirming an anomaly noted in a primary communications string on the spare end effector installed during a prior spacewalk Jan. 23 was not hardware related, and can be corrected through the implementation of software. A confidence test verifying the software upgrade was successfully completed Saturday night.
During its initial power up after last Tuesday’s spacewalk swap, the spare latching end effector did not communicate as expected on the primary string, but did so on its backup communications string. As a result, Monday’s spacewalk by Mark Vande Hei of NASA and Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) was replanned to return the original latching end effector to the arm in place of the spare. But the software solution confirmed on Saturday will not require the spacewalkers to venture out on Monday.
Image above: Astronaut Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency tries on a pair of spacesuit sleeves inside the Quest airlock. To either side of Kanai are the U.S. spacesuits that were being readied for a pair of robotics maintenance spacewalks. Image Credit: NASA.
The original spacewalk by Vande Hei and Kanai to bring an end effector inside the station removed from the arm during a spacewalk last October, and install the end effector removed last Tuesday on the mobile base system rail car on the station’s truss, is expected to be executed by the two crew members in mid-February.
Related links:
Expedition 54: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition54/index.html
Space Station Research and Technology: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/index.html
International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html
Animation (mentioned), Image (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Mark Garcia.
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