NASA moves up date of historic first all-female spacewalk
NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir will venture outside the space station at 7:50 a.m. Thursday, October 17 or Friday, October 18. Live coverage will begin at 6:30 a.m. on NASA Television and the agency’s website. The two were originally scheduled to make their historic all-female space walk on October 21.
Space station managers had postponed three spacewalks previously scheduled for this and next week to install new batteries in order to first replace a faulty battery charge/discharge unit (BCDU). The BCDU failed to activate following the October 11 installation of new lithium-ion batteries on the space station’s truss. The three spacewalks previously planned to continue the installation of additional lithium-ion batteries will be rescheduled.
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The BCDU failure has not impacted station operations, safety of the crew, or the ongoing experiments aboard the orbiting laboratory, many in preparation for future human missions to the Moon and Mars. The station’s overall power supply, which is fed by four sets of batteries and solar arrays, remains enough for all operations. However, the faulty power unit does prevent a set of batteries installed earlier this month from providing increased station power.
The BCDU’s regulate the amount of charge put into the batteries that collect energy from the station’s solar arrays to power station systems during periods when the station orbits during nighttime passes around Earth. Two other charge/discharge units on the affected 2B power channel did activate as planned and are providing power to station systems.
This will be Koch’s fourth spacewalk and Meir’s first. See the video accompanying this article to see the two astronauts discussing the possibility of conducting a spacewalk together.
(Source: NASA)
(Cover Image: NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, Image credit, NASA)
~ Posted by: Richard Webster, Ace News Today / Connect with Richard on Facebook and Twitter
