SPACE CENTER, Houston – Two astronauts on the space shuttle Endeavour ventured outside today for their second spacewalk and successfully wired up a billion-dollar robot arm to its permanent new home at the international space station.
“Hello, sunshine,” Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield said as he and U.S. astronaut Scott Parazynski flew into sunrise nearly 240 miles over the Pacific Ocean just west of South America.
Parazynski connected power, data and video cables at the arm’s new base. One of the two “hands” on the arm was plugged into this new socket Monday; it will remain affixed there for the next year.
It took the spacewalkers extra time and effort to get the backup power cable to work. Parazynski disconnected the cable and then reattached it. Then he and Hadfield opened another panel and checked connectors farther downstream on the cable; everything appeared to be fine.
Somehow that did the trick, and the backup power cable began working. “We’re all celebrating down here,” Mission Control radioed up.
Although only one power line is needed, NASA prefers two in case one fails.
The robot arm’s hand secured itself to the new base after letting go Monday of the 3,000-pound packing crate to which it was attached as a temporary mount. This baby step measured 24 feet.
Hadfield, meanwhile, removed an old and unnecessary radio antenna from the space station. One of the connectors came apart in his hands, and a small piece of it ended up under a hatch cover. He floated at the hole for about a half-hour, hoping to snag the part, but could not reach it and finally gave up.
“If only there was someone out here with long arms,” Hadfield said.
Hadfield also had trouble removing a video signal converter from the packing crate still attached to the other end of the robot arm. He gave up on that, too.
Hadfield and Parazynski wired up the robot arm through its packing crate during a seven-hour spacewalk on Sunday. Those cables were to be disconnected so the arm would get its power from the socket instead.
Other members of Endeavour’s crew and the station crew on Tuesday started unloading 6,000 pounds of supplies from Italian-built cargo carrier Raffaello. The carrier hauled everything from food and clothes to racks to hold science experiments. Once unloaded, the carrier will be filled with trash and returned to Endeavour for the trip home.
The 58-foot arm, built by Canada, will act as a high-tech construction crane, adding more pieces to the station over the next 15 to 20 years.
With two hands and seven joints, it will be able to move end over end – leapfrogging over itself – as more sockets are installed on the station, called Alpha. The limb’s construction ability will cut down on the need for astronauts to do similar outside work during spacewalks.
The arm will hand off its packing crate Wednesday to a smaller 50-foot arm attached to Endeavour in an orbital handshake.
But its first big job will come in June, when it attaches a pressure chamber to Alpha. That chamber will allow station astronauts to conduct spacewalks without the aid of a shuttle.
The space station’s three-member crew of Russian cosmonaut and commander Yuri Usachev and U.S. astronauts Susan Helms and Jim Voss met Endeavour’s seven-man crew Monday for the first time since the shuttle arrived Saturday to deliver the arm.
