Monday, November 9, 2015

EVA-33 a Success

Astronaut Kjell Lundgren moving along the station truss.
On Friday November 2, astronauts Scott Kelly and Kjell Lundgren completed a 6.5 hour spacewalk to fix one of the cooling systems on the station. The P6 Photo Voltaic Thermal Control System (PVTCS) on the truss had been leaking for some years at a very tiny rate. The leak had increased and so ground engineers needed a fix for the system. An earlier spacewalk in 2013 corrected the leak. During the repairs, the Trailing Thermal Control Radiator (TTCR, which looks like a small solar panel) was deployed to help with station cooling. Further changes in the cooling system meant that the TTCR was no longer necessary and as it was extended, it faced possible damage from debris strikes. The astronauts on Friday performed an EVA to re-route the cooling to the PVTCS, so that the TTCR could be retracted. The re-routing was completed, but ground engineers decided to leave the TTCR extended for now until a later EVA.
You can find a very detailed description of the EVA, with diagrams and pictures of the affected systems, at NasaSpaceFlight.com: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/11/astronauts-spacewalk-reconfigure-solar-array-cooling-system/

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