CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Two astronauts will spend their Thanksgiving afternoon spinning around the Earth with only spacesuits between them and the stars, and one will swoop across space station Alpha on the end of its mechanical arm. The spacewalkers, Endeavour crew members Michael Lopez-Alegria and John Herrington, will continue the construction work they began Tuesday with the successful installation of a new port-side girder on the International Space Station.
The finale of the 61/2-hour excursion will be Herrington's ride on the end of the station's Canadian robotic arm, operated by new ISS science officer Don Pettit.
"I'm happy to be there flying the arm," Pettit said. "It's the most marvelous machine that our friends up in Canada have put together, and it takes a lot of diligence to fly it. You've got to really watch what you're doing."
In a long, arching motion, Herrington will carry the port truss' 600-pound cart across the station to the starboard-side truss installed last month. That truss also has a hand cart.
Getting the carts out of the way will allow movement of the station's railcar, the car-size Mobile Transporter, into position on the port truss for future construction work.
The new and old station crews and the Endeavour crew won't have a lot of time to celebrate the holiday, and they might not get much in the way of traditional turkey. The crew has chosen a "fairly international menu" for what will be flight day six, said Paul Dye, lead shuttle flight director.
"Like anybody, they have a fairly large pantry full of food, and I know that there's probably a fair amount of chicken and turkey on board," Dye said, "and just because we have something listed for them on a certain day doesn't mean that's what they're going to eat that day. So I have a feeling they're probably going to make a feast of it."
Wednesday, the shuttle and station crews worked on repairing the Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly, the American carbon-dioxide scrubber, which was functioning intermittently. The crews have been relying on the recently repaired Russian scrubber and installed a supplemental lithium hydroxide canister Wednesday evening to filter the air.
Lopez-Alegria, wearing solid red stripes on his suit, and Herrington, in a solid white spacesuit, start their spacewalk about 2:20 p.m. They have one more spacewalk after this one, on Saturday.
The spacewalkers will hook up fluid jumpers between the port truss and a central truss and install equipment for transmitting wireless video from helmet-cams before moving the truss' hand cart.
Installing the fluid connections for the ammonia-based cooling system could be challenging, Herrington said. "They're very stiff, and you're underneath the truss. In the (training) pool, it was hard, because you're upside down. . . . It was probably more difficult in the pool than it will be in flight."
The Boeing-built port and starboard trusses extend the station's railway and will be used to support solar arrays.
Published under license from FLORIDA TODAY. Copyright © 2002 FLORIDA TODAY. No portion of this material may be reproduced in any way without the written consent of FLORIDA TODAY.
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