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Spacewalkers go to work after station truss installed BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: September 12, 2006
This is the 70th spacewalk devoted to space station assembly and maintenance since construction began in December 1998. Going into today's excursion, 43 NASA astronauts, 13 Russians and four astronauts representing Japan, Canada, France and Germany had logged 418 hours and 17 minutes of spacewalk time building and maintaining the international outpost. Tanner, veteran of a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission, logged 33 hours and 21 minutes of EVA time in five previous spacewalks. Piper, a former Navy diver, is flying for the first time. The primary goal of today's spacewalk is to connect 13 umbilicals to provide station electricity to a new solar array truss segment that was attached to the space station's unfinished power truss earlier this morning. The electricity is needed to operate internal heaters until the new arrays can be unfurled later this week. The astronauts also plan to release a variety of launch restraints and to set up the truss for array deployment. Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean, operating the space station's Canadian-built robot arm, carefully positioned a 35,000-pound 45-foot-long solar array truss today so motorized bolts could engage to lock it to the station's main cross beam. The first three of four anchor bolts, the requirement for a successful attachment, were secured by 4:35 a.m. The fourth bolt then was to be tightened. There were no problems of any significance this morning and the work was fully engaged by 5:06 a.m. To get to the work site on the end of the port 1 truss segment, Tanner and Piper will first exit the Quest airlock, using 55-foot-long safety tethers. Crossing over a spur to the S0 truss atop the Destiny module, the spacewalkers will move across the forward face of the truss to the port side and, reaching the end of their safety lines, hook up to a different 55-foot tether. Once at the P1/P3 interface, they will swap tethers again, switching to 85-foot safety lines. A key aspect of the spacewalk is the tight choreography between flight controllers, Tanner and Piper as the ground powers down one channel of the station's electrical grid at a time to permit the astronauts to safely plug in the umbilical cables that will route power and data to and from P3/P4. The 13 umbilicals will be connected in stages. The first six, located on the lower side of the truss, will be connected as soon as Tanner gets in position about 45 minutes into the spacewalk. The second set of seven umbilicals, located on the top of the truss, will be connected about three hours later.
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VIDEO:
STEP-BY-STEP PREVIEW OF SPACEWALK NO. 1 