Articles by William Harwood
Spacewalkers reconfigure station cooling system
Space station commander Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren carried out a busy but mostly trouble-free spacewalk Friday, routing ammonia coolant back to the prime radiator used by one of the lab’s solar arrays and bypassing a secondary radiator that was activated three years ago to help pinpoint a coolant leak.
Solar wind blasting away Martian atmosphere
The solar wind, the million-mile-per-hour stream of charged particles blasted away from the sun, is slowly but surely stripping away Mars’ atmosphere and likely played a major role in turning the red planet from a habitable world in the distant past into the dry, frozen wasteland seen today, scientists said Thursday.
Station astronauts complete tedious spacewalk
Space station commander Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren carried out a tedious seven-hour 16-minute spacewalk Wednesday, installing cables needed for a new docking mechanism, mounting insulation panels on a physics experiment to improve cooling and lubricating the latching mechanism of the station’s robot arm.