CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Tucked away
with the new hardware set to launch into space aboard NASA's shuttle Discovery on
Wednesday night is a desperately-needed spare part for the International Space
Station's urine recycler.
The urine
recycling system, which was first delivered to the International Space
Station (ISS) last November by the shuttle Endeavour, has been malfunctioning
since it was installed. Though the technology may sound icky, it is considered
vital for the space station to accommodate crews of six astronauts, double its
current occupancy of three.
"It is a priority to get it on
orbit, installed, and get the urine processing facility back hopefully
functioning and working," Discovery's payload manager, Robby Ashley, said
in a Tuesday briefing here at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. "And as well,
it's important that we get the failed unit that's on orbit now back down on the
ground so we can continue with our failure investigation."
Discovery is poised to
launch Wednesday evening at 9:20 p.m. EDT (0120 March 12 GMT) from a
seaside launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center to deliver new U.S. solar arrays
to the space station. The new component for the urine recycler, a roughly
180-pound (82-kg) "distillation assembly," is already packed tight
into the shuttle's mid-deck storage area.
The distillation assembly contains a
motor-driven centrifuge that helps prepare urine for recycling. Soon after the
machine was put into place it
started acting up, and a series of on-orbit repairs failed to permanently
fix the problem. Mission managers hope replacing the faulty element with a
spare will get the urine recycler back on its feet by May, when the expanded
crew shifts are set to begin.
"We're lucky that the shuttle
is coming up soon to bring us a good distillation assembly," space station
commander Michael Fincke said in a recent televised interview.
The urine recycler is part of a
larger system is designed to collect astronauts' urine, sweat and other
liquids, and filter it back into potable water through a seven-step process.
The final product is fresh water for drinking, food
preparation, bathing and oxygen generation.
Being able to recycle these fluids
into usable water is essential to host larger crews on the space station because
it reduces the amount of heavy fresh water that must be toted up on spacecraft.
Fincke said the other parts of the
recycling system that convert astronaut sweat and other wastewater back into
drinking water have been working fine. Without the urine processor, the space
station could likely support a six-person crew as long as NASA's space shuttles
-which produce water as a fuel cell byproduct - continue to visit the orbiting
lab, he added. But NASA currently plans to retire its three-shuttle fleet in 2010.
"This is exactly why it's good to
have the space station to try these things out, rather than trying them for the
first time on the moon," Fincke said. "This way, we can figure out all the
little tricks and gotchas, and perfect the technology, and then we can go
farther away from home."
SPACE.com is providing continuous
coverage of Discovery's STS-119 mission to the space station, with reporter
Clara Moskowitz at Cape Canaveral and senior editor Tariq Malik in New York. Click here for mission
updates and SPACE.com's live NASA TV video feed.
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