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| Image above: In the Quest airlock on the International
Space Station, two spacesuits await a busy day of spacewalking. Credit:
NASA |
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Final days of preparations for August 3rd spacewalk
Flight Engineers Jeff Williams KD5TVQ and Thomas Reiter DF4TR prepared
spacesuits and tools, conducted a dry run of exit and entry procedures,
and moved the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm into position. The
arm's cameras will provide television views of the spacewalk.
Williams and Reiter will leave the station's Quest airlock at 9:55 a.m.
EDT Thursday, Aug. 3, for the 6-hour, 20-minute spacewalk. Station Commander
Pavel Vinogradov RV3BS will serve as the spacewalk choreographer from
inside the complex. NASA TV coverage of the spacewalk will begin at 9
a.m. EDT.
The expedition crew members continue to set up new equipment brought
onboard the station after Discovery docked on July 6. Williams is wrapping
up the week-long checkout of a super deep-freezer. Installed in the Destiny
laboratory, it has 300 liters of freezing and storage capacity in four
compartments for life sciences and biological samples, preserving them
for return to Earth.
Last Wednesday, just before 1 a.m. EDT, the ISS Progress 21 engines fired
for 3 minutes, 5 seconds in the first of two reboost maneuvers designed
to place the station at the proper altitude for rendezvous and docking
with Space Shuttle Atlantis during the STS-115 mission. A second reboost
will be conducted in late August, just before the launch of Atlantis.
• NASA astronauts Michael Lopez-Alegria and Sunita Williams and Russian
cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin have been named as the 14th crew of the International
Space Station. Expedition 14 is scheduled to begin this fall.
Read
more about the Expedition 14 crew
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