New York
—
The international space station (ISS) has new armor to guard against wayward meteorites and orbital debris after a successful
June 6 spacewalk by two Russian cosmonauts.
Expedition 15 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineer Oleg Kotov attached a dozen metal plates to a Russian segment of the ISS and found signs of past damage in some areas.
“We found a dent or a hole from a meteorite,” Yurchikhin told mission controllers in Russia from his perch atop the station’s Zarya control module. “It looks like a bullet hole. I want to say the size is about
5 to 6
millimeters.”
Yurchikhin
and Kotov installed the new debris shields and other equipment on the space station’s outer hull during a five-hour, 37-minute spacewalk that began at 10:23 a.m. EDT
as the orbital lab flew
354 kilometers
above the horn of Africa.
The June 6 spacewalk marked the second in eight days for the Expedition 15 crew. Yurchikhin and Kotov also installed orbital debris shields and performed other tasks during a May 30 spacewalk. NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, an Expedition 15 flight engineer, monitored her
crewmates from inside the ISS during both spacewalks.
The Expedition 15 crew now is
gearing up for the arrival of NASA’s STS-117 astronauts aboard the shuttle Atlantis, which is slated to launch towards the ISS
June 8.
More shields, new equipment Yurchikhin and Kotov attached 12 aluminum panels to a sensitive area of the space station’s Russian-built Zvezda service module – which houses the ISS crew quarters – during their
June 6 spacewalk.
“Everything is excellent,” Yurchikhin said during the installation. “I guess we’re lucky.”
The new panels, along with five others installed by the Expedition 15 crew during the May 30 spacewalk, give Zvezda additional protection against impacts from micrometeorites and orbital debris (MMOD). NASA officials have said that such
MMOD
strikes represent a major risk to the ISS and NASA shuttles in Earth orbit.
“The number one risk for the shuttle is MMOD when it’s on orbit,” Kirk Shireman, NASA’s deputy ISS program manager, said before
the spacewalk. “It’s also that way for ISS, although the station was designed to live in a debris environment.”
Each of the 17 aluminum plates installed by Yurchikhin and Kotov during their two spacewalks are about
2.5 centimeters
thick and cover a
0.6-meter by 0.9-meter
patch of the ISS, NASA officials have said. They join six other panels that were installed by ISS astronauts during a 2002 spacewalk.
In addition to the new shields, Yurchikhin and Kotov mounted a Russian experiment dubbed Biorisk to the station’s exterior to study the effects of weightlessness on micro-organisms.
The cosmonauts also ran a
13.1-meter
Ethernet cable across the top of the station’s Russian-built Zarya control module as part of a computer network upgrade that will, once complete, allow astronauts to control the outpost’s Russian segments from the U.S. modules, NASA officials said.
The June 6 spacewalk marked the 83rd excursion dedicated to ISS construction or maintenance and the 55th to originate from the orbital laboratory
. It was also the 22nd excursion to begin at the station’s Pirs docking compartment.
Both Yurchikhin and Kotov now have two spacewalks, totaling of 11 hours and two minutes of orbital work, under their belts. Yurchikhin will add to that experience during a third spacewalk planned for the Expedition 15 mission.
But that spacewalk, a U.S. excursion in NASA spacesuits, must wait until after the upcoming STS-117 shuttle mission to the ISS, which will deliver American astronaut Clayton Anderson to the orbital laboratory. Atlantis astronauts will stage at least three spacewalks during their 11-day mission to install new solar arrays and trusses to the space station’s starboard side.
Anderson will relieve Williams as an Expedition 15 crewmember and will participate in the U.S. spacewalk with Yurchikhin.
“It’s so dynamic,” Yurchikhin said of during the June 6
spacewalk as he and Kotov took pictures while resting between tasks. “It’s just like an action movie.”
