Astronauts perform spacewalk to reinstate space hire batteries

Astronauts went spacewalking Friday morning to offshoot adult imagination new batteries on a International Space Station’s sprawling energy grid.

Commander Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson got a palm from a space hire drudge that took caring of many of a grunt work.

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Remotely regulating robotics aboard a 400-kilometre-high lab, moody controllers in Houston spent a past week replacing decade-old, nickel-hydrogen batteries with improved charging lithium-ion ones. Handling all those batteries — any about half a fridge in stretch — was unwieldy and time-consuming.

On Friday, it was adult to Kimbrough and Whitson to handle adult a 3 new lithium-ion batteries, delivered final month by a Japanese. Spacewalkers will block in 3 some-more subsequent Friday, partial of a long-term bid to vitalise a station’s aging solar energy system.

NASA expects it will take dual to 3 years to change out all 48 nickel-hydrogen batteries that make adult a solar energy system. The lithium-ion batteries are so efficient, usually 24 will be indispensable altogether, saving space for other load during supply runs.

The space station’s robotic handyman, long-armed Canadian-made Dextre, private a aged batteries and popped in a new ones in a array of manoeuvres that began on New Year’s Eve. Dextre — brief for deft — also loosened bolts holding down special steel plates that were launched with a new batteries. Installing these plates fell to Kimbrough and Whitson.

NASA’s arch astronaut, Christopher Cassidy, pronounced from Mission Control that gummy bolts mostly stymie astronauts, so everybody was beholden to palm over a duty to Dextre. Riding on a finish of a station’s drudge arm, Dextre and a three-and-a-half metre arms also done easy work of a battery transfers from one finish of a hire to a other, a stretch travelling approximately half a football field.

“Most of that’s behind us,” Cassidy pronounced as a spacewalk got underway, “and we’re looking brazen to a relatively, hopefully, we don’t wish to hex us, though a well-spoken day of battery operation.”

Risky work

Spacewalks are high-risk activities, NASA managers noted, and so shortening organisation time outward is always preferable. In fact, roughly as a reminder, Mission Control’s categorical hit for a spacewalkers was Italian wanderer Luca Parmitano, who scarcely drowned in 2013 when his helmet flooded with H2O from his space suit’s cooling system. He destined Kimbrough and Whitson’s each move.

Most of a aged batteries will be junked along with other hire trash, blazing adult in a atmosphere after this month in a Japanese supply boat that delivered a new batteries. More lithium-ion batteries will arrive on destiny load craft.

Whitson now ties a record for many spacewalks by a lady — seven. At age 56, she’s a oldest and many gifted spacewoman ever.

Article source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/astronauts-perform-spacewalk-to-replace-space-station-batteries-1.3924053?cmp=rss