Jun 4, 2008 7:48 am US/Eastern
Astronauts Tackle Toilet Trouble
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) ―
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With astronauts hustling inside and out, the international space station got its biggest live-in addition yet, a Japanese lab stretching 37 feet that opens for business Wednesday. (File)
AP
With astronauts hustling inside and out, the international space station got its biggest live-in addition yet, a Japanese lab stretching 37 feet that opens for business Wednesday.
Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide had the honor of installing the billion-dollar lab, named Kibo, which means hope, just as two crewmates were winding up a spacewalk Tuesday. He used the space station's robot arm to nudge the bus-size lab into place.
"We have a new hope on the international space station," announced Hoshide.
NASA's deputy space station program manager, Kirk Shireman, later noted, "It was an amazing day."
The drama was to continue Wednesday afternoon, when the 10 space fliers on the linked shuttle and station open the doors to the lab and float in.
A far more mundane matter was on tap for the morning: toilet repairs.
Space shuttle Discovery's crew hand-delivered a new pump for the space station's malfunctioning toilet, and the two Russians on board planned to install it. The job was expected to last two hours.
The space station crew has been forced to flush manually with extra water several times a day, ever since the toilet broke two weeks ago. The problem is confined to the urine side of the commode.
The long process of installing Kibo began with a spacewalk by Michael Fossum and Ronald Garan Jr. They took care of all the preliminaries, removing covers and disconnecting cables, then handed off to the robot arm-operators inside, who lifted the lab out of Discovery's payload bay and attached it to the space station.
The Japanese lab is bigger and more sophisticated than the two other labs at the space station. It sports a hatch to the outside and a robot arm for sliding out science experiments. A smaller arm will arrive next spring, along with an outdoor porch for holding the experiment packages.
The first part of Kibo - essentially a storage shed - was delivered by the last shuttle crew in March. The astronauts aboard the linked shuttle and station will attach the shed to the lab on Friday.
The lab work was just part of Tuesday's spacewalk, the first of three planned for Discovery's nine-day space station visit.
Fossum and Garan also helped remove a 50-foot shuttle inspection beam from the space station and get it back to Discovery, and worked on the station's jammed solar wing rotating joint. Fossum tried out some cleaning techniques on the joint, which is gummed up with metal shavings, while Garan put in a new bearing.
The joint has been used only sparingly since last fall, hampering energy production. NASA still does not know where the grit came from or how best to deal with the problem.
As for Discovery, the photos taken by the space station residents just before Monday's linkup uncovered just four small areas of tile damage on the shuttle's belly. The damage is so slight that no detailed inspection will be required, said LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team.
(© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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