CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Determined to do better than last week, the international space station’s two astronauts ventured back outside Wednesday on an unusually risky spacewalk and successfully replaced a bad circuit board.
American Mike Fincke and Russian Gennady Padalka safely crossed nearly 100 feet to get to the repair location – a grueling distance for spacewalkers over potentially dangerous terrain. Then they pried off the tray protecting a row of circuit breakers; it was stiff and incredibly hard to move.
“I got it,” Padalka said, breathing heavily.
Mission Control warned the men to take their time.
“We understand,” Fincke replied. “We’re not out of the woods yet. We’re just getting started.”
They quickly removed the fried circuit breaker and pushed in the spare. Then they rested while flight controllers conducted electrical tests to see if the swap was good.
Last Thursday, their first attempt at the job was aborted just 14 minutes after they opened the hatch because an oxygen-flow switch on Fincke’s suit did not lock into the proper position.
NASA was anxious to get the circuit board replaced to restore power to one of the gyroscopes that keep the 225-mile-high outpost steady and pointed in the right direction. The circuit board conked out in April, leaving the space station with just two good gyroscopes, the bare minimum.
The space station is down to just two crew members, instead of three because of the grounding of the shuttle fleet since the Columbia disaster. As a result, no one was left inside to watch over the station during the spacewalk, a situation NASA never tolerated until this year.
A cooling failure in the space station’s American spacesuits a month ago forced the switch to the stiffer, more-pressurized Russian suits.
Using the Russian suits meant an exit from the Russian hatch – 80 feet to 100 feet from the broken circuit breaker – and an excursion over treacherous terrain, including antennas and jagged edges that could tear a spacesuit. The 50-foot extension boom helped close the gap, but the crew still had a considerable amount of hand-over-hand walking to do and an assortment of safety tethers – both Russian and American – to hook and unhook.
Associated Press
Astronauts Gennady Padalka (left) and Mike Fincke replace the faulty circuit breaker on the international space station on Wednesday.
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