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ISS Astronauts Performed Second EVA on Sunday

Spare parts for the station were unloaded from Endeavor

Jul 20, 2009 05:46 GMT  ·  By
Astronaut Tim Kopra, mission specialist, is pictured during the first of five planned spacewalks to be performed on the International Space Station by the STS-127 crew
   Astronaut Tim Kopra, mission specialist, is pictured during the first of five planned spacewalks to be performed on the International Space Station by the STS-127 crew

On Sunday, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) prepared for the second extra-vehicular activity (EVA) of the STS-127 mission, to take place today, when they used the station's robotic arm to unload a spare-part container from Endeavor's cargo bay. The supplies, which are destined for critical systems on the laboratory, will be unpacked today, and some of them installed in their respective places.

For this event, two astronauts aboard the shuttle, Commander Mark Polansky and Pilot Doug Hurley, used the robotic arm on the craft to lift the container from the cargo bay, and maneuvered it within reach of the ISS' robotic arm. The container is now safely stored at a special location at the end of the arm, awaiting deployment later today. “It's basically a platform and attached to the platform are three very large pieces of equipment. If required at some point in the future, it's basically a hot spare ready to go on orbit,” Polansky said for NASA in a pre-flight interview, Space informs.

“We will be changing the batteries on the P-6 solar array, six large batteries that each weigh around 300, 350 pounds, the size of small refrigerators. That's the oldest solar array system on the space station so we'll rejuvenate that solar array system,” Mission Specialist Dave Wolf added in a similar interview about today's EVA.

While the two shuttle astronauts maneuvered the spare-part container into position, the rest of the crew spent their day getting ready for David A. Wolf's and Christopher J. Cassidy's spacewalk today. Scheduled to last for six hours and 30 minutes, its main objectives will be to install the JEF Visual Equipment (JEF-VE) on the forward sections of the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM).

During the mission's first EVA, which took place on Saturday, spacewalkers David A. Wolf and Timothy Kopra managed to successfully attach the open, porch-like segment of the Kibo module, thus completing the $1-billion Japanese laboratory, the largest and most complex on the ISS. “The Japanese Exposed Facility, or 'Jeff' as we tend to call it, is very impressive. It's a large external porch to the space station where high quality experiments can be conducted in high vacuum of space. It's really an exceptionally valuable piece of real estate being produced in outer space,” Wolf stated before the mission.

The 8,372-pound science deck was neatly installed, in a spacewalk that lasted five hours and 32 minutes. “We did an EVA and we did robotics. When you do all of those things simultaneously and it all works out as well as it did today, it is a great day in spaceflight,” Holly Riding, the lead space station flight director, shared on Saturday. “This was a proud moment. Today is a big day,” Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Kibo Deputy Project Manager Tetsuro Yokoyama added.