U.S. Harmony Module Readied for December Laboratory
“For us Europeans, it is a special event,” said Schlegel. “For me personally, it is is an honor and a duty and a joy for this team to bring up this unit and activate it in orbit.”
Commander Peggy Whitson and flight engineer Dan Tani will perform two spacewalks early Tuesday in order to prepare for the scheduled December arrival of the European Space Agency’s Columbus laboratory. These will be the first of the two spacewalks during the next five days, aimed at completing the module’s external outfitting. This fitting will serve both laboratories as presurized passageways…the Columbus lab and the Japanese Kibo science research facility.
Most of today has been spent by both astronauts preparing for the Tuesday spacewalk, focusing on the two spacesuits inside the U.S. Quest airlock. The public is welcome to the six-hour, 40-minute excursion beginning at 6 a.m., but it will begin to broadcast at 4:30 a.m. With the two individuals planning on rigging up Harmony’s electrical power and cooling system, they will need to move an 18.5 foot fluid line pallet to Harmony, where it has been at a temporary storage location on the station’s central truss—middle most segment. According to the Flame Trench article online, this tray weighs 300-pounds, and is equipped with lines that will route the toxic collant ammonia to the Harmony module.
What makes this spacewalk special is that it is the tenth one to be staged without a shuttle present at the International Space Station. The Atlantis commander, Steven Frick, has confirmed that the Atlantis space shuttle launching for December is still on schedule, with everything going smoothly so far. The Columbus laboratory was built by the ESA, or European Space Agency. It weighs about 545,000 pounds and is 54 percent finished, and after launching it will be spending 11 days in space. Three spacewalks are scheduled when it docks on the ISS, and possibly another is planned as an extra.
This past weekend a helium isolation valve in the forward reaction control system of the Atlantis shuttle was found and solved. Its fault remained open regardless what the commands were, and a lug of ground equipment fixed it.
This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Mission Objectives, 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.
