http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20120830/SPACE/120830008/Astronauts- venture-out-spacewalk?nclick_check=1
CAPE CANAVERAL - A pair of spacewalking electricians are venturing outside the International Space Station today to swap out a faulty U.S. power-switching unit. U.S. astronaut Sunita "Suni" Williams and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency started a planned 6.5-hour spacewalk floating at 8:16 a.m. EDT. "Have fun," U.S. astronaut Joe Acaba told his crewmates as they prepared to exit the American Quest airlock module. The excursion is the second this month at the international outpost. Cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Yuri Malenchencko relocated a cargo boom on the Russian side of the station Aug. 20. But the spacewalk today is the first performed by a U.S. astronaut since the final shuttle mission in July 2011. Williams and Hoshide aim to replace a faulty power-switching unit on the central truss of the station, the skeletal backbone of the outpost. The Boeing-built truss stretches about 360 feet from end to end - about the length of an American football field - and serves as a mount for four massive U.S. solar wings. NASA lead spacewalk engineer Kieth (cq) Johnson said the astronauts also will route cables that will feed electrical power to a new Russian laboratory module to be launched in 2014. The spacewalk will be the 164th conducted in the assembly and maintenance of the space station, the first two building blocks of which were linked in low Earth orbit in late 1998. In that time, more than 100 astronauts and cosmonauts have tallied more than 1,000 hours of time working in the deadly vacuum environment outside the outpost. _______________________________________________ Please be sure to include a URL to the article. Reply to the sender with a "Thank you" if you like this post. _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
