Fifth And Final Spacewalk Finalizing Endeavour Mission
“It might seem like a kind of routine maneuver, but it’s really not,” said Endeavour shuttle pilot Gregory H. Johnson, who will wield the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm, before flight. “This particular task keeps me up at night a bit.”
At 5:23 p.m. EDT (2123 GMT), the space shuttle Endeavour’s sensor-tipped inspection boom will be attached to the ISS in order to aid a future mission by the space shuttle Discovery, as it cannot carry its own boom as it launches on May 25 due to cargo shortage in room, due to carrying the Japanese Kibo laboratory. .
Not as easy as it sounds, two astronautic spacewalkers, Robert Behnken and Mike Foreman, and the Endeavour’s robotic arms, will be required to work out an intricate balance while attaching it to the station. The inspection boom was used this past Friday afternoon, in order to check out the space shuttle Endeavour’s wing edges and nose cap for damage by micrometeorites or the orbital debris.
This balancing act involves handing off the 50-foot long boom, located between two robotic cranes. Then it must be maneuvered “within inches” of the ISS’s main truss, in order for the spacewalkers to grab it, attach a lifeline-like heater cable so the laser and camera sensors will not freeze. All to be done within a 90-minute deadline, of course.
The Inspection Boom Assembly is a development by NASA following the Columbia 2003 shuttle accident, in order to inspect the underside of the shuttle before it reenters Earth’s atmosphere. An extension to the robotic arm of the Space Shuttles, the IBA supports inspection of the shuttle’s thermal protection system.
The IBA was developed upon preexisting hardware, a hardware which came from the shuttle arm program. The only difference is the arm joints are replaced with aluminum transitions, which cements the joints in place. The boom tip is specially designed to interface within a sensor suite in order to access the Orbiter’s thermal protection system. It fits on the starboard side of the Shuttle, held by a holding mechanism that was meant to support a second arm by the designer. The arm of the shuttle and the ISS’s Canadarm2 can pick up the IBA once it is in orbit, made to grapple fixtures.
Grappling fixtures are on both the forward and mid-transitions, with the forward transition having a modified Electrical Flight Grapple Fixture as the interface to the shuttle arm, while the mid-transition having a Flight Releasable Grapple Fixture as an interface to the Space Station Arm.
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 2:31 am and is filed under Space Agency News, Technical Concerns, Mission History, Public Relations. 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.
