NASA, ESA astronauts ready for Tuesday’s antenna swap spacewalk
Baku, August 18, AZERTAC
The Expedition 75 crew has completed preparations and mission managers are go for a spacewalk to swap out a high-speed antenna outside the International Space Station on Tuesday, according to NASA.
Meanwhile, there was still time on Monday’s research schedule for cardiac research, artificial intelligence tests, and Earth observations.
Two station flight engineers, one from NASA and one from ESA (European Space Agency), are scheduled to set their spacesuits to battery power at 8:35 a.m. EDT on Tuesday signifying the start of a planned six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk. NASA astronaut Anil Menon and ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot will exit the Quest airlock into the vacuum of space and replace an old high-speed data and communications antenna with a spare on the orbital outpost’s Z1 truss segment. The duo will switch the antennas between Z1 and an external stowage platform and make the delicate electrical and data connections to activate the spare antenna.
Menon and Adenot began Monday’s shift staging their spacewalking tools and inspecting their safety tethers inside Quest. They followed that up with a procedures review that will see Menon ride the Canadarm2 robotic arm while Adenot is tethered to the orbital outpost. Afterward, the astronauts finished staging their spacesuits and configuring the inside of the airlock.
Flight engineer Jack Hathaway and station commander Jessica Meir will be monitoring the spacewalkers and operating Canadarm2 from inside the station on Tuesday. Hathaway and Meir partnered together on Monday and studied the external camera and lighting configurations they will use to during the robotics operations. The duo then joined Menon and Adenot after lunchtime and called down to mission controllers to discuss spacewalk safety procedures and the fine-tuned robotics maneuvers.
The space station’s other three crewmates, cosmonauts Andrey Fedyaev, Pyotr Dubrov, and Anna Kikina, began their workweek on a wide array of science experiments and lab maintenance for Roscosmos.
Fedyaev began a 24-hour session on Monday wearing sensors and cuffs to comfortably monitor his heart rate and blood pressure while he worked and slept. Next, Fedyaev tested using artificial intelligence tools to transcribe crew reports for review on Earth.
Fedyaev also partnered with Dubrov and replaced orbital plumbing components in the Nauka science module. The duo finally installed a specialized camera to automatically capture multi-wavelength imagery of Earth landmarks during the crew’s sleep shift. In between the life support and science work, Dubrov loaded the Progress 94 resupply ship with trash and obsolete gear in advance of the cargo craft’s departure in September.
Kikina primarily spent her shift on life support maintenance and taking inventory of hardware stowed throughout the station’s Roscosmos segment. She finally set up another Earth observation camera for an automated overnight session to photograph volcanos and islands throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
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