Two astronauts
will venture outside the International Space
Station (ISS) today for a short round of orbital golf and laboratory
maintenance.
ISS Expedition
14 commander Michael
Lopez-Alegria and flight engineer Mikhail
Tyurin are slated to spend six hours working outside the station in what
will mark the first of four planned spacewalks during their six-month mission.
NASA TV will broadcast today's spacewalk live beginning at 5:00 p.m. EST. Click here. |
Among the
highlights of today's spacewalk--scheduled
to begin at 6:00 p.m. EST (2300 GMT)--will be Tyurin's golf shot, a stunt spurred
by a commercial agreement between Russia's Federal Space Agency and the Canadian golf
equipment firm Element 21.
"The crew
is taking this very, very seriously," said Holly Ridings, NASA's lead
Expedition 14 flight director for today's spacewalk. "So they've been doing a
lot of practice, some of it on their own time."
Tyurin will
lead today's extravehicular activity (EVA), the entirety of which takes place
on the space station's Russian-built segments. He and Lopez-Alegria will wear
their identically red-striped Orlan spacesuits
during the activity. Their fellow Expedition 14 crewmate, European
Space Agency astronaut Thomas Reiter, will remain inside the ISS during the
spacewalk.
Video: Spacewalk Golf
Expedition 14 lead spacewalk officer Glenda Laws narrates plans for a Nov. 22, 2006 spacewalk.
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Par for
the orbital course
Almost
immediately after stepping into space today, Tyurin and Lopez-Alegria will set
up for their orbital golf shot on a ladder jutting out from their starting
point: the station's Russian-built Pirs docking compartment [image].
"I will be
behind him yelling, 'Fore!'" Lopez-Alegria has said of Tyurin's orbital golf
session. "I guess we'll just have to see how far it goes. It depends how much
of it he gets."
Tyurin, a veteran
Russian cosmonaut, will use a gold-plated six iron and an ultra-light golf ball
that weighs just one-tenth of an ounce (three grams) [image].
Because his movements are restricted inside the bulky Orlan spacesuit, Tyurin
must hit the ball with a sort of one-handed swat.
"He'll be
directing it with a putting-type motion," Glenda Laws, NASA's lead Expedition
14 spacewalk officer, said of he space shot. "And it will head out over the aft
end of the [Zvezda] service module."
Tyurin will
carry three golf balls into space with him, but may not hit all of them, Laws
said. That decision will be made by the cosmonaut and Russian flight controllers,
she added.
Lopez-Alegria,
meanwhile, will stand by to help stabilize Tyurin and film his golf shot. The
video will later be used in an Element 21 commercial.
"We kind of
though that this was going a kind of fun thing to do because we're using a
space material and we're introducing that in the golf industry," Element 21
president and CEO Nataliya Hearn told SPACE.com.
NASA and
Russian safety officials have found that the upcoming golf shot poses no debris
risk to the ISS or a December
shuttle mission, but disagree on how long the golf balls may stay in orbit.
NASA expects them to deorbit after a few days, while Russian studies yielded
maximum flight times of three years or so.
ISS
maintenance
Today's
planned spacewalk is a breather of sorts between
a pair
of busy shuttle missions to complete
assembly of the orbital laboratory.
"On this
EVA, I think the bulk of the activities are research oriented," said Kirk
Shireman, NASA's deputy ISS program manager, adding that certain activities
will aid future tasks aboard the station.
One such
task includes the relocation of a navigation antenna at the aft end of the
station's Zvezda module. The antenna will help guide an unmanned European cargo
ship to the Zvezda docking port some time in mid-2007.
A
Russian-built Progress
cargo ship is currently docked at Zvezda. Another spacewalk chore calls for
Tyurin and Lopez-Alegria to lash down an antenna on that Progress 23 vehicle
that did not properly stow itself when the spacecraft arrived last month [image].
ISS
managers want to make sure the antenna does not catch a nearby handrail when it
undocks next year.
"When we
depart, basically, the hooks open and there's a spring force that pushes away,"
Shireman said. "So if any part of the Progress vehicle was attached still to
the station, it would cause the Progress to swing and its trajectory would not
be what we intended and could pose a hazard to the ISS."
New
science
The
spacewalkers will also inspect a telescoping Russian crane and install a new
science instrument known as BTN Neutron to monitor charged and neutral
particles in low-Earth orbit, especially during solar flares and other events.
If time
permits, the Expedition 14 astronauts may also retrieve a Russian materials
exposure experiment and replace it with a fresh one.
The golf
shot, too, has been referred to as an experiment. Element 21 officials hope it
will inspire people on Earth, as well as commemorate the 35th
anniversary of NASA astronaut Alan Shepard's lunar tee off [image]
during the 1971 Apollo
14 mission to the Moon.
"[S]pace
seems to be very esoteric, and whatever happens there seems to have very little
relationship to whatever happens down here," Hearn said, adding that it is a
welcome coincidence that the golf shot comes during Expedition 14. "And when
you've got Alan Shepard playing golf on the Moon, a sport played by millions in
the U.S., it brings a little bit of space back to Earth.
"It makes
it more real, it makes it more human, and more tangible," she said.
NASA
will provide a live broadcast of the ISS Expedition 14 crew's spacewalk on NASA
TV beginning at 5:00 p.m. EST (2200 GMT). You are invited to follow
the spacewalk using SPACE.com's
NASA TV feed, which is available by clicking here.
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