Fourth Spacewalk Concluded with Honors
Mission Specialists Patrick Forrester and Steven Swanson took a 6-hour and 29-minute walk in order to finish the activation of the International Space Station’s new truss segment today, finishing up at 6:54 p.m. EDT. The spacewalk was begun at 12:25 p.m., in order to prepare the Starboard 3 and 4 (S3/S4) truss segment for its operation which was installed on June 11. Quite a bit of the work was in regard to activating the Solar Alpha Rotary Joint (SARJ), allowing the S3/S4 arrays to track the Sun.
There is the possibility of another day being added on the mission, pushing forward the day coming home due to extra docked operations for the STS-117. This will be known on Morning morning “if” there is a problem during the Monday morning test of the Russian attitude control capabilities on their computers. Otherwise, the STS-117 crew will exit the station later on Monday evening sometime before 6:23 p.m., with plans for the Atlantis Space Shuttle undocking at 10:42 a.m. Tuesday. The completed spacewalk is the 87th mission that is devoted solely to station assembly and maintenance.
Another important milestone in the mission is United States astronaut Sunita Williams, who set the record for women’s “longest single spaceflight” that finalized on Saturday morning, June 16, 2007, at 12:47 CDT. Another woman astronaut, Shannon Lucid, set her own record of 188 days, which was passed by Williams on Saturday. Sunita Williams began her record-setting spaceflight with the launching of STS-116 where she was a crewmember, and then she joined the Expedition 15 crew in April. The spaceflight of which she has become famous for will end when she returns to Earth aboard the now famous Space Shuttle Atlantis with the STS-117 crew. If the Atlantis returns as scheduled on June 21, she will have flown a total of 194 days in space.
Another interesting aspect of Sunita Williams was her collection of her own blood during the space flight, in addition to rigorous exercise. The only flight she was ever on, this flight was used for an ongoing study on nutrition in space, especially living in space for long stretches of time. Highly important, the study of her blood may possibly impact nutritional requirements and food systems that will be developed for space ventures in the near future
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 17th, 2007 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News, Technical Concerns. 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.
