New Japanese Laboratory Preliminaries Onboard Today
Seven hours outside the International Space Station may not seem like much, but to veteran spacewalker Fossum and first timer Garan, it probably seems like forever. Wearing the spacesuit with red stripes, Fossum is the lead spacewalker reports, ” “Our biggest task on EVA 1, our first spacewalk, is really preparing the space station to receive the Japanese module,” Fossum said in a preflight NASA interview. “There’s some covers and launch locks we have to pull off… All these things have to be done manually and so really we’re the blue collar help.”
The new room, moved out of the Discovery’s payload bay at the end of the spacewalk, will not only be attached to the station’s new perch but make everything much more roomier. Additionally, they will be cleaning grit out of the gummed-up solar wing joint. Since Monday night the two astronauts have been staying in the ISS’s Quest airlock for today’s spacewalk—the very first of the three upcoming spacewalks. Inside the space station will be STS-124 pilot astronaut Ken Ham, the spacewalker choreographer, helping the two men outside do their job correctly. “My role in that team is to be the person on the inside of the shuttle that helps conduct the spacewalk in a real time sense,” Ham said before the flight. “That, I’ve learned over the last few months, is a really fun, rewarding job. It’s a chance to be flexible and use the assets you have in real time to try to coordinate getting a maximum amount of efficiency out of Mike and Ron.”
Inside the International Space Station are mission specialists Karen Nyberg, Akihiki Hoshide, and Greg Chamitoff, helping out to operate the space station but also running the shuttle robotic arms. Once the Kibo’s arms are deployed, Karen Nyberg will be the first person ever to operate the three ISS’s robotic arms while on duty at the ISS. Presently, the spacewalks are being used on a trial run for gloves, and their new fix which is designed to prevent tearing near the thumbs—a tear which is seen very often on recent missions. The new fix involves something called “Turtle Skin fabric” which will be worn on the thumb and index finger, a materian that resists cutting four times better than any other normal fabric.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 7:45 am and is filed under 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.
