Two astronauts from NASA will conduct this year's fifth spacewalk on March 13 to complete numerous system upgrades to the International Space Station (ISS). Said agency will also provide a live coverage to begin at 6 a.m. EST via the NASA television, NASA app and its official website.
Scheduled to exit the Quest airlock of the station around 7:30 a.m. for a spacewalk planned to last roughly six-and-a-half hours are Expedition 64 Flight Engineers Michael Hopkins and Victor Glover.
During the said spacewalk, Hopkins and Glover will vent early ammonia system jumper cables and have one of them relocated close to the Quest airlock to reconnect the jumper cable to the current cooling system, enhancing its efficiency.
The pair will connect cables too, for the Columbus Bartolomeo payload platform, continuing work from a late January spacewalk, and have a cable replaced for an amateur radio system.
Hopkins and Glover will also have a wireless antenna assembly replaced on the Unity module. They are also set to install a 'stiffener' on the thermal cover of the airlock to provide added structural integrity and route cables to provide Ethernet capabilities for a pair of high-definition camera systems o the port truss or 'backbone' of the station.
Expedition 64
A NASA article posted on its website said on January 27, Hopkins and Glover concluded a spacewalk that lasted six hours and 56 minutes. The crew for this task, the Expedition 64, installed a Ka-band antenna, identified as COL-Ka on the outside of the European Space Agency Columbus module, which will allow an independent, high-bandwidth communication connection to European ground stations.
Essentially, Bartolomeo is partly operational and is a safe configuration following the link of four out of six cables to the science platform.
During this particular spacewalk, the two astronauts took out a pair of grapple fixture brackets on the far port left truss to prepare for power system upgrades in the future.
Glover worked for the replacement of suspected broken pin inside an airlock of the station as what NASA describes as a 'get ahead' task.
However, the teams determined that a replacement pin was not necessary after an inspection verified that the existing pin was properly functioning.
ISS Surpassing a 2-Decade Milestone of Continuous Human Presence
A Yahoo! News report said that Glover would be wearing red stripes on his suit as EV1 or extravehicular crew member 1 during what would be his career's fourth spacewalk.
Hopkins, on the other hand, as described on NASA's YouTube video below, will be spacewalking as EV 2 and wearing a suit without stripes. This would be his fifth in his entire career.
He will put on a high-definition or HD camera on his helmet to provide clear views of the Columbus connectors.
These connectors' mating is one of the many tasks postponed from past spacewalks to allow astronauts to complete the installation of modification kits for new solar arrays scheduled for launch later this 2021.
In November last year, the ISS surpassed its two decades of milestone of continuous human presence, providing opportunities for distinctive technological demonstration and study that help get ready for long-duration missions to the Moon and the Red Planet while improving as well, life on this planet.
To date, more than 240 people from 19 nations have visited the orbiting laboratory that has accommodated almost 3,000 research studies from study investigators in more than 100 nations and areas.
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