Astronauts will unload some spare
parts for the International Space Station Monday in a spacewalk that comes 40
years to the day of the first moon landing by men from Earth.
During the planned 6 1/2-hour
spacewalk, astronauts Dave Wolf and Tom Marshburn will unpack a container
filled with a spare antenna, pump mechanism, and small motor that was delivered
to the orbital outpost when the Endeavour
docked Friday.
It is the second spacewalk for
Endeavour's astronauts, who lifted off last week on the eve of the Apollo 11
mission's launch and now find themselves in space with six station
crewmembers during the 40th anniversary of the historic July 20, 1969 moon
landing.
"It's amazing where we've come
since that time," lead space station flight director Brian Smith.
"Everything we've accomplished with the space station is built upon what
was done in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs."
Smith said the occasion was a chance
to reflect on the changes to the space program since.
"One of the biggest contrasts
to me, and a very positive one, is the international part of the station,"
he said. "Back when we landed
on the moon, obviously we weren't working together. Now you look at what
happens when countries team up together. Now we can do so much more and set an
example for the rest of the world."
While the Wolf and Marshburn work
outside, engineers
on Earth are trying to come up with a fix for the broken toilet aboard the orbital outpost. The flooded toilet is one of
just two on the outpost for all 13 people - a record high - living and working
aboard the linked station and shuttle Endeavour. There is a toilet aboard the
shuttle Endeavour that astronauts can use, but NASA wanted the crew to limit
its use since the waste it collects cannot be vented overboard since it could
contaminate a new experiment porch that spacewalkers helped install on
Saturday.
Vital spares for station
Monday's spacewalk will be dedicated
to moving a set of vital spare parts from a carrier to their permanent stowage
place outside the station.
"These are three critical
spares, we call them, which should they fail, the current units on the space
station, it would lose serious redundancy or even lose the space station
eventually," Wolf said in a preflight interview. "So restocking the
space station with these very critical components is essential to the space
station's life and productivity on past shuttle retirement."
The antenna will be used on a
space-to-ground communications system. The pump mechanism helps power a cooling
system, and the motor is a drive system for a movable platform on the station's
back-bone like truss.
While Wolf is a veteran
spaceflyer with five spacewalks under his belt, Marshburn will be making
the first spacewalk of his career.
"They're going to allow me a
few minutes what they call translation adaptation,' for the first time in the
spacesuit to hold on to a handrail and just kind of use the muscles of your
wrist, kind of move up and down, kind of get a feeling of actually how you're
going to start moving rather than just taking off and find out you don't know
how to stop and before it's too late, you pull yourself off or your feet, you
know, come flipping around and you bang into something," Marshburn said in
a preflight interview. "So they'll give me about ten minutes to practice
moving around a little bit."
Astronauts unloaded the carrier from
Endeavour's cargo bay Sunday using the shuttle and station robotic arms. Wolf
and Marshburn plan to transport the spare parts to a storage platform on the
station's truss.
This will be a tricky task because
the equipment is packed tightly in the carrier and the spacewalkers must make
sure the delicate gear doesn't hit any of the other cargo on its way out.
"Tom and I will be manipulating
this box slowly down, kind of holding our breath," Wolf said. "And I
can tell you after we get that locked into place and didn't damage that
antenna, I'm going to be breathing a lot easier."
When the spacewalkers finish that
task, they plan to move over to a new exposed science porch that was attached
to the station's Japanese Kibo lab Saturday. There they will install a camera
system on the porch so that astronauts inside the station can view the outdoor
platform.
While Wolf and Marshburn are outside
spacewalking, pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Julie Payette and
Koichi Wakata will help out from inside by operating the station's robotic arm.
This is essential because Wolf plans to reach into the cargo carrier while
attached to the end of the arm, called the Canadarm2. Marshburn will float
freely to carry out his tasks.
"It will be a great deal for
Dave because he's going to get to see some incredible views of space station as
he's flying up and over the truss, and then back down to the [cargo carrier] each
time," Hurley said in a NASA interview. "So he's probably got one of
the best seats in the house for EVA 2."
SPACE.com is providing continuous
coverage of STS-127 with reporter Clara Moskowitz 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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