TCEP Space
ISS Expedition Five First Spacewalk Friday
On Friday 16 August,
Expedition Five Commander Valery Korzun
and Flight Engineer Peggy Whitson
stepped outside the Pirs Docking Compartment of the International Space Station and installed debris shields on the
Russian Zvezda module, during a four-hour twenty-five
minute long spacewalk.
This was the first of
two spacewalks for the Expedition Five crew, the third of Commander
Korzun's career and the first for Flight Engineer Whitson. It was the
forty-second spacewalk in support of space station assembly and maintenance and
the seventeenth staged from the station itself. Twenty-five spacewalks at the
space station have originated from visiting space shuttles.
While Commander Korzun and Flight Engineer Whitson worked outside, Flight Engineer Sergei Treschev maintained the space station's
systems from inside.
After a one-hour and
forty-three minute delay to the start of the spacewalk because of a
misconfigured valve regulating the operation of the primary oxygen bottles in
their Orlan spacesuits, Commander Korzun and Flight Engineer Whitson opened the
hatch to the Pirs Docking Compartment at 0923 GMT as the space station flew
over the southern Atlantic Ocean, east of the southern coast of South America,
at an altitude of two hundred and thirty statute miles.
The astronauts first
task was to set up tools and extend a telescopic crane, called the Strela boom, from the side of the docking
module that is attached to the Zvezda module. They then moved six micro
meteoroid debris shields from a temporary stowage location on the connecting
module adapter between the
Due to the late start of
the first spacewalk, Russian flight controllers decided to defer the
refurbishment of the Kromka experiment on the Zvezda module. The Kromka
experiment is designed to collect samples of residue emitted from the module's
jet thrusters. That task and the swabbing of thruster residue from Zvezda's
hull for analysis, was subsequently carried out on the second spacewalk, on
Monday 26 August .
After retrieving their
tools and stowing the Strela crane, Commander Korzun and Flight Engineer
Whitson returned to the Pirs Docking Compartment and closed the hatch at 1348
GMT to complete their excursion.
With acknowledgement to NASA for source material.
Copyright Richard West.
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