Sunday, December 22, 2013

Second unscheduled exit NASA astronauts into space postponed one day - BBC News

U.S. space agency NASA postponed from Monday, December 23, on Tuesday, December 24th, the next exit astronauts Richard Mastracchio and Michael Hopkins EVA for troubleshooting in the cooling system of the International Space Station (ISS).

At the final stage of EVA committed the day before, Richard Mastracchio damaged his suit in the airlock. In this case it is not no danger threatened. Postponement of the date of the next spacewalk due to the fact that the crew of the station needed more time to prepare a spare spacesuit for astronauts.

According to experts NASA, December 21 spacewalk was extremely successful, according to ITAR-TASS. Astronauts Mastracchio and Hopkins worked well ahead of schedule and completed a number of works that were originally planned for the second spacewalk.

In particular, they were able to turn off and remove the faulty pump in one of the two circuits of the cooling system of the American segment of the ISS, as well as transfer it to an external load platform. It is expected that within the next exit astronauts installed a new pump. Earlier it was planned to hold another – third – exit operation, but may not need it now.

As reported, on Saturday, December 21, spacewalk began at about 7:00 on the East Coast of the U.S. (16:00 GMT) and ended at 12:29 (21:29) . Originally it was planned that Mastracchio and Hopkins will be in the open space of 6.5 hours, NASA considered even possible to increase the operating time up to 7 hours, but that did not happen.

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