Two NASA astronauts ventured out of the International Space Station early Tuesday, continuing work to improve the lab’s aging solar system. Looking inside the lab was Mark Vande Hei, who completed his 340th day in space on his way to a new one-flight record for an American astronaut.
Retired astronaut Scott Kelly recorded 340 days and eight hours in orbit during a nearly one-year stay at the station in 2015-16, easily setting a record for the longest flight of a NASA astronaut. Vande Hei was on his way to surpassing Kelly’s mark on Tuesday and is expected to interrupt a total of 355 days off the planet when he returns to Earth aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on March 30th.
NASA
“I think it’s great,” Kelly told CBS News in a recent telephone interview. “What do you say, records are made to break? And that means we’re doing things better than before. So yeah, congratulations to him.”
Regarding the conflict in Ukraine and tense relations between the United States and Russia, NASA administrators say both sides continue to work together to operate the International Space Station and that Vande Hei will return home as originally planned along with two Russian cosmonauts.
“I can tell you that Mark will be back home with that Soyuz,” Joel Montalbano, director of the space station’s program, told reporters on Monday. “We are in communication with our Russian colleagues, no problem. The three crew members are returning home.”
Aboard the space station on Tuesday, astronauts Kayla Barron and Raja Chari changed their space suits to battery power at 8:12 a.m. ET to officially launch the second of 16 space launch, or EVA, scheduled for this year. Six will be made by NASA astronauts working on the power upgrade and 10 by cosmonauts equipping new laboratories and Russian docking modules.
NASA TV
The veteran of the spacewalk Barron was assigned a red-striped suit and the EV-1 radio call sign. Chari, making her first spacewalk, wore an unmarked suit and used the EV-2 call sign.
The aim of the excursion was to install supports on the base of a right solar wing, so that the new folding solar blankets of the ISS (IROSA) can be connected at the end of this year to feed more energy in the space station’s electrical system.
The space station was originally equipped with four solar matrix wings, two on each side of a long armor that stretched along a football field. Each wing consists of two 39-foot-wide blankets that extend 112 feet in opposite directions. The oldest wing was launched in December 2000 and the newest in 2009.
The matrices feed eight electrical circuits, two per wing. When the station is in daylight, the matrices charge the batteries and provide power to the lab’s multiple systems. During the night passes, the batteries supply the energy stored in the station.
Solar cells are degrading over time and NASA is adding six new blankets in a $ 103 million upgrade. Each of the new IROSA blankets measures 20 feet wide by 63 feet long when fully extended at an angle to the underlying wing.
NASA
The first two IROSA blankets were installed in the left outer solar wing to increase energy channels 2B and 4B during space exits last June. During a September EVA, supports were installed to support the IROSA blankets in the 4A matrix of the left inner channel.
Tuesday’s spacewalk was dedicated to installing supports on the right inner solar wing at the base of wing 3A of the electrical channel. The sun blankets will be placed later this year.
If all goes well, next year the final IROSA blankets will be installed on the right side of the electrical armature to complete the upgrade.
“Over the next year or a year and a half or so, we’ll be installing all the different matrices,” said Dina Contella, space station operations integration manager at Johnson Space Center.
“These new arrays overlap with the inherited arrays and all in all, after upgrading six of the eight channels, we will have increased power generation from 160 to 215 kilowatts.”
- In:
- space walk
- International Space Station
- NASA
Add Comment