The duo cosmonauts of Expedition 50 are psyched pp for ‘Spacewalk’ on Friday
Two onboard astronauts of Expedition 50 – the 50th mission to the International Space Station (ISS) are all set to take a momentous venture outside of the station on 6th January 2017. The final preparations for the spacewalk by two cosmonauts like Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson will kick off on Friday at 7 am EST. As said by NASA, the duo astronauts will take a spacewalk close to the solar arrays on the starboard tether section. During the first 6.5 hour spacewalk, the astronauts will replace a series of power batteries used to save energy from one of the four sets of solar arrays integrated into the ISS. European Space Agency (ESA)’s astronaut Thomas Pesquet and cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy will assist the two spacewalkers Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson from inside the ISS.
Starting from Friday at 7 am EST, the commander of Expedition 50 Shane Kimbrough and the chief flight engineer Peggy Whitson will go on with the multi-step surrogate procedure throughout a premeditated six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk. A second EVA is programmed for 13th January with Kimbrough and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet.
The primary aim behind the spacewalk is to reinstate the power tool of the International Space Station (ISS). During the first 6.5 hours of the trip, the spacewalkers will put 12 aging nickel-hydrogen batteries back with six tinier but more influential lithium-ion power packs. To recall, the new batteries were shipped to the ISS last month appended with a pallet in the payload bay of an HTV cargo ship developed by Japan.
Alongside this replacement, the astronauts will also remove four of the older batteries integrated into the IEA and will ship three of them to the HTV pallet for ultimate discarding. On the other hand, the fourth one will be temporarily built up on a storage fixture, situated at the bottom of the arm’s SPDM or hand-like multi-attachment special purpose dexterous manipulator.
After working on the consignment over the holiday weekend of New Year, flight administrators and controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston distantly activated the robot arm of the ISS, in order to install three lithium-ion batteries in the incorporated electronics assemblage – a set of solar arrays, located at the bottom of the starboard 4, or S4.
