14 DAY TRIAL // Officials at the American space agency announce that the emergency spacewalk they planned for the astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has been bumped to Friday, August 6. Initially, they said that the extra-vehicular activity (EVA) will take place on Thursday, but the new delay is prompted by more thorough reviews of the proposed time lines. The second spacewalk has been scheduled for August 9 (Monday), and NASA mission planners hope this is all it takes to fix the ammonia tank issue.
This Saturday, the orbital facility experienced a serious glitch, when Loop A of the cooling system shut down. The mechanism is designed to remove excess heat from a number of modules and laboratories that currently make up the space lab, and so the six astronauts of the Expedition 24 crew had to close all experiments and processes that produced too much heat. The overall error was caused by a failed ammonia pump, which astronauts now need to change during the two spacewalks. NASA flight engineers Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson were selected to conduct the EVAs.
“Flight controllers and station managers made the decision Monday night after reviewing proposed time lines, final procedures for the repair work, and the results from a spacewalk dress rehearsal conducted in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory near NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. NASA Television coverage of both spacewalks will begin at 5 am CDT. Wheelock and Caldwell Dyson are expected to begin the spacewalks from the Quest airlock at 5:55 am. Friday's spacewalk will be the fourth for Wheelock and Caldwell Dyson's first,” NASA officials say in a press release.
“Wheelock and Caldwell Dyson originally were scheduled to perform a spacewalk to outfit the Russian Zarya module for future robotics work and prepare the station for the installation of a new US permanent multipurpose module. However, because of the importance of restoring redundancy to the station's cooling and power systems, the two new spacewalks will be dedicated to the pump module replacement,” the document goes on to say. Since the crisis began, NASA is adamant that the six crew members were never endangered by the glitch. Officials say that such issues are unavoidable in a machinery the size and complexity of the ISS.