Astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch will repair the damage done to the International Space Station’s power system. (Image credit: NASA)
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NASA has recently announced the first-ever all-female spacewalk, which is expected to take place Friday morning (October 18) at 7:50 AM (ET). The pair will replace a failed power controller known as a battery charge-discharge unit (BCDU), which comes after several earlier spacewalks that replaced the station’s nickel-hydrogen batteries with newer, more powerful lithium-ion batteries. The excursion was initially planned for October 21, but NASA altered the schedule to make the urgent repair.
The spacewalk will entail venturing to the far side of the ISS, on the Port 6 truss structure, which is made up of 11 segments, plus another compartment known as Z1, which has attachment points for solar arrays, thermal control radiators, and external payloads. The truss segments also house electrical and cooling utility lines, along with Mobile Transporter rails that provide the astronauts with a moveable work platform. The astronauts explain their mission in the video below.
Once at Port 6, the astronauts will take approximately 5 ½ hours to replace the failed BCDU, which has been in use since December of 2000. The device regulates the charge to batteries that collect power from solar arrays and distributes that power to the ISS. The damaged BCDU will be chucked onto the next SpaceX Dragon resupply ship and returned to earth where it will undergo inspections to see why it failed.
The spacewalk is the second of a series designed to upgrade the BCDUs, along with another five planned for repairing an Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer- a state of the art particle physics detector, which was launched on the Space Shuttle Endeavor back in May of 2011. For those interested, NASA TV will begin live-streaming the historic event at 6:30 AM (ET).
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