A Well-Deserved Break in Space
“We’re having a great time taking a break, just relaxing a bit,” Whitson told CBS News Wednesday night during a series of televised interviews. “I think we really needed it … It was nice to be able to get eight hours of sleep.”
The schedule for the ISS and Endeavour crew has been not only back-breaking, but long and arduous, making Wednesday a day off necessity. And now that Dextre was on sentential outside like a soldier at guard, a sigh of relief was deemed necessary for the exhausted crewmembers. Right in the middle of a record-long mission, the Endeavour space shuttle mission STS-123 is the longest shuttle mission to the ISS so far, and the crew is ahead of their work schedule. “They’ve gotten far enough ahead that we certainly won’t have to twist their arms too much to get them to rest,” ISS flight director Kwatsi Alibahuro told reporters late Tuesday. “This is a long enough mission.”
Up until Thursday, three of the five spacewalks have been completed for the orbital construction mission since their arrival on March 11. And so far, Japan’s Japanese Logistics Pressurized module has been put in place, in addition to the maintenance robot Dextre. With that in mind, a day off in the middle of the arduous schedule was deemed a necessity for the crew members.
The next spacewalk will involve the testing of a shuttle repair technique in which astronauts will “use a caulk gun-like tool to squeeze a pink ablative goo into intentionally dinged heat shield tiles to test its effectiveness as an in-flight fix”.
Since the 2003 loss of the Columbia shuttle and its crew, shuttle shield health has been a major concern for NASA since the wing damage was found to be the cause of it. So far, the caulk gun and goo-like material is the ONLY repair technique that has been tested so far under actual spaceflight conditions, according to NASA for the shuttle shields. And which has been an ongoing problem during launching for NASA, with concerns about the shuttles lasting until they are retired in 2010.
A fun sort of thing on the Wednesday day off was Japan’s space cuisine that was offered to the crew as a courtesy of Takao Doi, the Japanese astronaut. “The Japanese food was the best food we’ve had so far on this flight,” Gorie told Japan’s Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda during a space-to-ground video link late Wednesday.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 6:38 am and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
