Expedition 24 Flight Engineers Douglas Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson battled with a balky ammonia pump on a spacewalk that lasted for eight hours and 3 minutes. Sadly their efforts were in vain. A line connected to the pump began leaking ammonia forcing mission managers on the ground to reevaluate the situation. They decided to leave the pump where it is for the time being. The coolant problem has caused the International Space Station (ISS) to run at a diminished capacity since the pump began acting up.
The spacewalk marked the sixth-longest in human spaceflight history and the longest at the space station without a space shuttle present. For Wheelock it was his fourth spacewalk, it was Caldwell Dyson’s first. The pair wrapped up their first attempt at 3:22 p.m. EDT. Teams monitoring on the ground wanted to review the situation further before the next spacewalk, currently scheduled for Wednesday, Aug. 11, takes place.
[/caption]
Meanwhile all of the crew members are perfectly safe and the space station itself is operating at a normal capacity (many science experiments have been shut down to avoid overheating). Engineers also powered down and adjusted other systems on the station to avoid any complications. The ammonia pump failed last week and is one of two located on the space station’s S1 Truss element.
There are currently two additional spacewalks planned to address this problem. The next one is currently scheduled to take place no-earlier than Wednesday, Aug. 11.
Last November, NASA's Lucy mission conducted a flyby of the asteroid Dinkinish, one of the…
Steven Hawking famously calculated that black holes should evaporate, converting into particles and energy over…
NASA has given the go-ahead for SpaceX to work out a plan to adapt its…
The JWST is astronomers' best tool for probing exoplanet atmospheres. Its capable instruments can dissect…
First light for the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is quickly approaching and the telescope is…
A beautiful nebula in the southern hemisphere with a binary star at it's center seems…