This
story was updated at 8:41 a.m. EST.
Two
astronauts will celebrate the International Space Station's 10th birthday with
some mundane, but much needed, spacewalk maintenance today.
Endeavour
shuttle astronauts Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper
and Shane Kimbrough are slated to float outside the station's airlock at 1:45
p.m. EST (1845 GMT) for the second of four spacewalks aimed at cleaning and
lubricating a jammed solar array gear.
But today's
spacewalk will be the $100 billion space station's first of a new decade in
Earth orbit. Its first element, the Russian-built Zarya
control module, launched into space 10 years ago today.
"It's hard
to believe it's been 10 years," said Kirk Shireman, NASA's deputy station
program manager, who remembers it being a cold day on the steppes of Kazakhstan
when Zarya roared spaceward from Baikonur Cosmodrome. "This Thursday is a major
milestone for the space station."
Zarya was
the first station's first room. Since its 1998 launch, the outpost has grown
from an orbiting studio apartment into a three-bedroom research laboratory with
a Canadian robotic arm and modules from Russia, the U.S., Europe and
Japan.
The space
station has circled the Earth more than 57,309 times and traveled a distance of
more than 1.3 billion miles (2 billion km). About 165 people from 15 different
countries have visited the 313-ton orbiting laboratory.
Room
for 6
Endeavour's
astronaut crew is delivering vital hardware to double the space station's crew capacity
up to six astronauts per mission next year. Chief among their cargo: a water recycling
system that converts urine, sweat and wastewater back into drinking water
and new gear to expand the station into a five-bedroom, two bath, two kitchen
space research outpost.
Equally
important are the four spacewalks planned for the mission, which are aimed at
cleaning metal grit from a massive gear that turns the starboard solar arrays
like a paddlewheel to always face the sun. The gear has been damaged for more
than a year, with Stefanyshyn-Piper leading a spacewalking team on the arduous
chore of replacing bearings, cleaning the mechanism and greasing it up to
extend its performance.
"This is
what you have to do to live and work in space 24-7, 365," NASA chief Michael
Griffin told SPACE.com, adding that making unexpected fixes are vital
for the station and future trips back to the moon and on to Mars. "It's a pretty
humble, workman-like task, and I'm sure there's going to be some bobbles as we
figure out how to do it, but this is the kind of stuff that you have to do."
Today's
spacewalk will be the 116th trip outside the station for maintenance and
construction. To date, astronauts have lived continuously aboard the station
since 2000 and spent 725 hours and 40 minutes working in space to build the
still un-finished orbiting laboratory.
NASA plans
eight more shuttle missions to complete the space station, as well a ninth to overhaul
the Hubble Space Telescope, before retiring its aging, three-orbiter fleet
in September 2010.
Lost bag's
legacy
Stefanyshyn-Piper
and Kimbrough are going into today's spacewalk determined to keep careful track
of all of their tools.
During a
Tuesday spacewalk, a 30-pound (13-kg) bag of crucial tools for cleaning up the
gear escaped from
Stefanyshyn-Piper while she was trying to clean gobs of grease that had
leaked all over her equipment.
"You have
to learn from your mistakes. We're definitely not going to do it again, you're
not going to see us lose another bag," she told the Associated Press Wednesday.
"We're going to double and triple check everything from here on out."
With the
loss of Stefanyshyn-Piper's bag and the grease guns, scrapers and wipes it included,
she and Kimbrough will have to share their remaining gear in order to complete
their cleaning tasks. They plan to improvise a makeshift lubrication tool by
preparing some terry cloth-like wipes with the space grease ahead of time to
avoid slowing each other down too much by having to share one set of tools,
mission managers said.
The
astronauts will also add a touch of grease to the space station's Canadarm2
robotic arm. They'll also reposition pair of carts on the outpost's
backbone-like truss to set the stage for the deliver of new starboard solar
wings early next year.
But the
solar array gear cleaning will take the bulk of their time and so far, the
orbital tune-up job has gone well, NASA officials said.
"It's going
perfectly," said space station flight director Ginger Kerrick on Wednesday.
"Just as expected."
NASA is
providing live coverage of Endeavour's STS-126 mission on NASA TV. Click here for SPACE.com's mission
coverage and NASA TV feed.
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