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| STATION ASSEMBLY CONTINUES DURING SPACEWALK |
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On the fourth day of Atlantis' flight, Mission Specialists Ed Lu and Yuri Malenchenko will venture outside into the Shuttle's cargo bay to begin the sixth space walk in support of the assembly of the International Space Station (ISS) and the 50th space walk in Shuttle history. Lu, designated EV 1, will be making his first space walk and will wear the space suit marked by red stripes. Malenchenko, who conducted two space walks totaling 12 hours during his 1994 flight aboard the Russian Mir Space Station, is designated EV 2 and will wear the pure white suit. The main objective of the planned 6½ hour space walk by Lu and Malenchenko is to attach a 6-foot long magnetometer and boom to a port on the newly arrived Russian Zvezda Service Module. The magnetometer will serve as a type of navigation tool, or compass, using data acquired from the Earth's magnetic field to "tell" Zvezda's computers how it is oriented in relation to the Earth. In doing so, Zvezda's propellent usage will be minimized in maintaining the orientation of the ISS until the arrival in January of the U.S. Laboratory Destiny, which will take over attitude control, or orientation, of the ISS through the Station's Control Moment Gyroscopes. With Mission Specialist Rick Mastracchio operating the Shuttle's robot arm and under the watchful eye of space walk choreographer Dan Burbank, who will both work at Atlantis' aft flight deck, Lu and Malenchenko will ride the Canadian-built arm as far as it will take them, about 50 feet above Atlantis' cargo bay. Then they will use tethers and handrails along the ISS' modules to make their way to a point more than 100 feet above the cargo bay for the magnetometer installation, the farthest any tethered space walker has ventured outside a Shuttle. This portion of the space walk should take about an hour and a half. Lu and Malenchenko will be twice as high above the bay as were Story Musgrave and Jeff Hoffman during the STS-61 mission when they mounted the top of the Hubble Space Telescope to replace its magnetometers. Once the magnetometer hook up is complete, electrical, data and television cables between the newly arrived Zvezda Service Module and the Zarya Control Module to which Zvezda is docked will be connected. In all, nine cables will be rigged between the two spacecraft in a procedure expected to last almost three hours. Four of the cables are critical power connections required before the end of the STS-97 mission to the ISS to deliver the sprawling U.S. solar arrays. These cables will enable power to flow from the arrays to the Russian modules to augment the solar arrays on both Zarya and Zvezda since the U.S. arrays will shade portions of the Russians arrays once they are installed on the top of the Z-1 truss framework. Two of the cables will provide an internal closed circuit video feed for crew members in Zvezda so they can monitor the docking of the second Russian Progress resupply mission to the ISS in late September which will linkup to the bottom, or nadir, docking port to Zarya. Two additional cables will link data from Zvezda to Zarya for, among other things, the commanding of Zarya solar array pointing from Zvezda now that the Zarya's motion control system has been deactivated. A final fiber optic cable will be strung between Zvezda and Zarya to enable data to flow from the suits worn by Russian space walkers once the ISS airlock is installed at the starboard port of the Unity connecting node to accommodate joint U.S.-Russian space walks. Until then, ISS space walks must be conducted from Zvezda's transfer compartment. This will be the second joint U.S.-Russian space walk outside a Space Shuttle. On October 1, 1997 on the STS-86 mission, Astronaut Scott Parazynski and Cosmonaut Vladimir Titov performed a five-hour space walk while Atlantis was docked to Mir. Three other space walks have been jointly conducted by astronauts and cosmonauts outside Mir without a Shuttle present:
There have been five previous space walks conducted for the assembly of the International Space Station:
In all, the five space walks performed to date have totaled 36 hours, 1 minute of ISS assembly time. |
Editorial/Technical Comments: ShuttlePresskit
EVA Timeline for STATION ASSEMBLY CONTINUES DURING SPACEWALK
Time
Event
2/16:20
Egress
2/16:35
EVA Sortie Setup
2/17:50
Magnetometer
2/19:05
FGD-SM Cable Install
2/21:05
EVA Sortie Cleanup
2/22:35
Ingress
