ISS’s “Gigantor” Finally Has Power and Its Arms
Well, it is Sunday and the Canadian robot Dextre at the International Space Station has its arms on, thanks to the space ingenuity of the ISS crewmembers. Thank goodness. But still not an easy task, with about 45 minutes lost in the entire process.
Saturday night the giant robot, Dextre, wrestled outside the station with the two astronauts, Rick Linnehan and Mike Foreman, as they struggled to the robot’s bolts that were needed to attach the giant’s robotic arms. Both men had arrived at the space station on board the Endeavour shuttle, and have been struggling with their Canadian friend “Dextre” ever since. Their space construction job late Saturday night for the 1.7-ton amazon’s construction took about 7 hours and 8 min to get it assembled.
What had held them back during the excursion were the bolts which had been stuck on a U-shaped shipping platform. And to be entirely truthful, maybe NASA training courses did not involve holding onto a heavy pry bar hanging by a rope out into space, meanwhile trying to pry stuck bolts of a gigantic robot by the name of Dextre from where they had been anchored much too tightly during its transporting in the Endeavour. But maybe it was a course in “other” or “miscellaneous” to cover emergency situations?
The second spacewalk completed for the STS-123 shuttle mission, a previous problem for Dextre had occurred when Dextre’s heaters could not be powered up, due to a flawed power cable in its Spacelab Pallet—a condition that was fixed on Friday evening, March 15, 2008 by Mission Controllers at the Johnson Space Center.
Once the two astronauts began Saturday evening’s repairs, and the retention bolts were pulled out to relocate Dextre’s two 775-pound arms, things began slowly falling into place. “It’s really eerie out here,” Linnehan said as he lifted Dextre’s massive trunk from the end of the space station’s robotic arm. “It’s pitch black and it’s just this big white kind of demonoid looking thing below me, with arms and legs.” Rather humorous, the gigantic maintenance robot may look like something out of a spooky movie, but it can handle the most minute and highly detailed job that saves the astronauts from donning their bulky suits and going out into space. As time goes by, this rather awkward looking giant will become their very best friend and buddy, with looks obviously being misleading in the end.
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Technical Concerns, The Gear to Get There. 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.
