Thursday, August 12, 2010

Adding Spacewalks

Astronauts successfully removed the broken pump in the ISS cooling system yesterday, but the job is proving to be bigger than NASA had first thought. The space agency is now saying four spacewalks, twice the original number, will be required to do the job.

The third spacewalk is scheduled for sometime next week. NASA is being careful to get the repair process right, and to avoid overtaxing either the ISS crew or the engineers on the ground working to develop the techniques and procedures the spacewalkers will use.

NASA has that option now because the backup cooling system in the U. S. part of ISS and the Russian system in the Russian part are both working well. If one of those falters, however, the pressure will be on to get these repairs finished quickly.

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