Nelson added that he had been invited to travel to Moscow for an in-person meeting.ĬOVID allowing, I will go at the earliest opportunity, he said. It is therefore a great advantage to give them this practice to be successful tomorrow.Īhead of last week’s launch of the new Russian node module, Prichal, Nelson said he had spoken with Dmitry Rogozin on several occasions and reassured the good working relationship in space with Russia. This timing allowed us to get Tom and Kayla into our neutral buoyancy lab or our large pool where we do spacewalks and train for our exact exit that will be performed tomorrow, said Vincent LaCourt, director of NASA spacewalk flights. We found out that we had a degraded S-band assembly in mid-September. outside the Space Station as well as with the EV team on the ground. Marshburn, who will be performing his fifth spacewalk, will be strapped to the end of the Canadarm2 robotic arm to work with Barron.Įuropean Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Matthias Maurer will operate the arm from inside the station, and NASA astronaut Raja Chari will watch over his shoulder and provide some communication between the crew at the station. “The space station has additional low-speed S-band systems, as well as the high-speed KU-band communication system that relays the video.”
While the degradation of the antennas had a limited impact on the station’s operations, the heads of mission decided to install a new antenna to ensure redundancy of communications, ”NASA said in a statement. They will replace a degraded S-Band Antenna Subassembly (SASA) with a spare that was sent to the Space Station about a decade ago. NASA hired astronauts Tom Mashburn and Kayla Barron to perform the operation. The 6.5 hour EVA (extravehicular activity) will be carried out to replace an active communication antenna on board the ISS for 20 years. Two Crew-3 astronauts will be able to conduct their first spacewalk as part of Expedition 66 aboard the International Space Station when that happens. In the meantime, the spacewalk is postponed and will resume once NASA gives the green light. “I think it shows that it was a hand of the Russian government that didn’t know what the other was doing. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in an interview with Spectrum News that the Russian military had acted without input from Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.Īnd that’s what’s so amazing, ”Nelson said. Several countries have previously condemned the destruction of the defunct Soviet satellite, which threatened the space station as well as many other satellites. This is therefore considered to be the risk of having a certain penetration size on the course during the duration of a six and a half hour VAS. Also, just to give you an idea, when we talk about EVA risk, it’s usually around one in 2,700. So it covers this range and, of course, larger items, Weigel said. There is an emergency oxygen pack on the suit that would fuel her for a while. She noted that there is an approximately 7% increased risk of penetration into spacesuits or the space station, which Weigel pointed out does not mean that it is a catastrophic event.įor the suit itself, there is a certain penetration size which is bearable. MMOD (meteoroid and orbital debris) is part of the family of what we have had for VAS over the past few years. So this is done simply by modeling and understanding the environment from previous experiences and knowledge. We’re running different models and predictions to figure out what our environment is like, of course most of those parts we’re talking about with the suit are a lot smaller than what we might be tracking, Weigel said.
At a press conference on Monday, November 29, Dana Weigel, NASA’s deputy director of the ISS, said as the agency continues to monitor the fallout from the Russian anti-satellite test which has created a large field debris in mid-November, the current risk during this spacewalk is within a safe operating range.