Spacewalkers Install Spares
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Frank Morring, Jr.
Astronauts Dave Wolf and Tom Marshburn bolted three big spare parts to the International Space Station truss Monday in the second of five spacewalks of the STS-127 mission of the space shuttle Endeavour.
With Wolf riding the station's robotic arm, the two removed a space-to-ground antenna, a coolant pump and a motor/transmission combo for the station's mobile transporter from the integrated cargo carrier (ICC) that held them inside Endeavour's payload bay and mounted them on an external stowage platform.
The spares - all of them too large to ride in any of the vehicles capable of visiting the station after the shuttle fleet retires next year - will remained prepositioned there against the day they are needed to keep the ISS functioning well into the coming decade.
The unpacking job took longer than planned, so the two astronauts skipped one job planned for the extravehicular activity (EVA) - setting up a camera to help guide payloads to the new exposed facility on Japan's Kibo laboratory.
Instead, Marshburn moved on to finish installing insulation sleeves on the cable system that allows the orbiter to draw power from the space station's grid, while Wolf started gathering tools and preparing to return to the airlock.
The EVA wrapped up at 6:20 p.m. EDT, after six hours, 53 minutes outside.
Meanwhile, inside the station Expedition 20 commander Gennady Padalka and flight engineer Frank De Winne successfully repaired one of the three toilets available to the 13 travelers in the two docked vehicles.
The only serious problem so far on the mission is the toilet failure in the U.S. Destiny lab. About six liters of pre-treated waste water flooded the separator pump, which adds chemicals that help separate solid from liquid waste. Padalka and De Winne wore protective gear for the two-and-a-half-hour job replacing the contaminated separator pump, control panel and a container for liquids. The combined crews had been restricted to using the toilets in the Russian service module and the orbiter, but were cleared for the Destiny toilet after the repair apparently fixed the problem.
Plans for Tuesday include using the shuttle and station robotic arms to pull an experiment pallet from the orbiter's payload bay and plugging it in to the exposed facility on Kibo, where the experiments riding the pallet will be installed later. The station arm also will remove the ICC from the station's mobile transporter to set up for another EVA on Wednesday, when spacewalkers will start installing batteries it carries on the far port end of the station truss.
File photo: NASA
