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Second spacewalk outside Kibo on tap today BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: June 5, 2008 Astronauts Michael Fossum and Ronald Garan are gearing up for a planned six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk today to mount cameras on Japan's Kibo lab module, remove launch locks and prepare a docking port for the attachment Friday of a Japanese logistics module. The spacewalk, the second of three planned for the shuttle Discovery's mission, is scheduled to begin at 11:32 a.m. when Fossum and Garan, floating in the station's Quest airlock module, switch their spacesuits to battery power. The spacewalkers spent the night in the airlock at a reduced air pressure of 10.2 pounds per square inch to help purge nitrogen from their bloodstreams as part of a standard protocol intended to prevent the bends after working in NASA's 5-psi spacesuits. The astronauts were awakened at 6:32 a.m. by a recording of "Fly Away" by Lenny Kravitz beamed up from mission control. "Good morning, Discovery," astronaut Shannon Lucid called from Houston. "A special good morning to you today, Ron." "Good morning, Shannon," Garan replied. "Just want to thank my beautiful wife, Carmel, for that song and say hi to her and to my boys, Ronny, Joseph and Jake. Mike and I are getting ready to go out the door for our second spacewalk today, It's going to be a wonderful day! And it's good to hear that song this morning." "And I agree, it's a great day for an EVA," Lucid said. Before the astronauts were awakened, space station Flight Director Emily Nelson provided an update on the station's Russian toilet, which flight engineer Oleg Kononenko repaired Wednesday by replacing a pump flown up aboard Discovery. "Oleg replaced the water separator, it was functioning fully when the crew went to bed," Nelson said. "Obviously, if nobody's trying to use it we don't get a status on it. But the last water separator (pump) that failed failed after only a few hours. This one was running perfectly right up to and past crew sleep, many hours after the remove and replace had taken place. So all good signs so far. We fully expect it's now fixed and we don't have to worry about it any more." Today's spacewalk is devoted to completing Kibo's external outfitting and preparing the new module for normal operation. Television cameras will be installed on the outboard bulkhead to provide visibility when operating the module's robot arm. Garan and Fossum will remove thermal covers from the arm's joints, along with no-longer-needed launch locks. The spacewalkers also will prepare an upper docking port for attachment of the Japanese logistics module. That module, launched in March with eight Kibo equipment racks inside, was temporarily mounted on the upward-facing port of the Harmony module. Now that Kibo is attached to Harmony's left-side port, the logistics module will be moved Friday to its permanent location. Along with prepping the docking port, Fossum and Garan also will fold back thermal blankets that engineers believe could interfere with the attachment mechanism. "The major objective of EVA 2 is to get the external outfitting completed on the JPM (Japanese pressurized module, Kibo) or as much as we can on that day," Garan said in a NASA interview. "So Mike and I will be carrying very large cameras, video cameras, and large stanchions. We'll be carrying them out to the Japanese laboratory's new home there. We'll be on the end-cone, actually, and we'll install those two cameras. I'll install the one on the forward side. Michael will install the one on the aft side and then we will be removing launch locks. "We'll remove covers from the joints of the Japanese robotic arm and then we will be on the zenith side of the JPM, of the Japanese laboratory, and we will remove covers from the common berthing mechanism. This is so the next day we can move the Japanese logistics module over to the top of the laboratory and we obviously need to take those covers off before we do that. So those are some of the outfitting tasks that we're going to be doing on EVA 2. "In addition to that, we're going to get ready for EVA 3," Garan said. "We're going do some of the preparation tasks that we need to do for EVA 3 and we have an object called the nitrogen tank assembly. That's something that we're going to remove and replace with a new one and so we need to get that all ready. We need to break torques on some of the bolts, do some of the fluid line disconnects, some of the electrical disconnects and then head way out to what's called ESP-3, which is a platform where we have the spare NTA. We need to prep that spare NTA to be ready to be moved over to where its new home will be." Here is an updated timeline of today's activity (in EDT and mission elapsed time; includes revision G of the NASA television schedule): EDT........DD...HH...MM...EVENT 06/05/08 06:32 AM...04...13...30...Crew wakeup 07:12 AM...04...14...10...EVA-2: 14.7 psi repress/hygiene break 07:57 AM...04...14...55...EVA-2: Airlock depress to 10.2 psi 08:02 AM...04...15...00...ISS daily planning conference 08:22 AM...04...15...20...EVA-2: Campout EVA preps 08:47 AM...04...15...45...Kibo outfitting 09:57 AM...04...16...55...EVA-2: Spacesuit purge 10:12 AM...04...17...10...EVA-2: Spacesuit prebreathe 11:02 AM...04...18...00...EVA-2: Crew lock depressurization 11:32 AM...04...18...30...EVA-2: Spacesuits to battery power 11:37 AM...04...18...35...EVA-2: Airlock egress/setup 12:07 PM...04...19...05...EVA-2: Install forward/aft cameras 12:57 PM...04...19...55...Kibo vestibule 3 outfitting 12:57 PM...04...19...55...EVA-2: Remove robot arm thermal blankets 01:57 PM...04...20...55...EVA-2: Zenith docking system preps 02:22 PM...04...21...20...EVA-2: Install trunnion and keel pin thermal blankets 03:02 PM...04...22...00...EVA-2: Prep ESP-3 nitrogen tank assembly 03:57 PM...04...22...55...Japanese logistics module egress 04:32 PM...04...23...30...EVA-2: CP9 television camera group retrieval 05:02 PM...05...00...00...Station arm (SSRMS) ungrapples Kibo 05:12 PM...05...00...10...Node 2 zenith CPA installation 05:32 PM...05...00...30...EVA-2: Cleanup and airlock ingress 05:42 PM...05...00...35...SSRMS grapples power and data grapple fixture-3 06:02 PM...05...01...00...EVA-2: Airlock repressurization 06:12 PM...05...01...10...Spacesuit servicing 08:00 PM...05...02...58...Mission status briefing on NTV 10:02 PM...05...05...00...ISS crew sleep begins 10:32 PM...05...05...30...STS crew sleep begins 11:00 PM...05...05...58...Daily video highlights reel on NTV
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VIDEO:
KIBO SCIENCE LAB ATTACHED TO THE SPACE STATION 