Two astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) conducted a spacewalk to continue the process of increasing the Station\u2019s electrical power generation output. U.S. EVA-72 was conducted by NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who officially began the sojourn at 06:37 EST\/11:37 UTC.<\/p>\n
The spacewalk ended with the major tasks completed but the lesser tasks deferred to a future spacewalk when work at the solar array site took longer than planned and spacesuit battery limits mandated a conclusion to the EVA after 6 hours 56 minutes.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Solar array background:<\/b><\/p>\n
The ISS is equipped with eight Solar Array Wings (SAWs), each of which were designed to produce around 30 kilowatts (kW) of power, for a total of about 250kW across all eight arrays. <\/p>\n
The oldest array, attached to the P6 truss, was launched in 2000 on the STS-97 mission of the Shuttle Endeavour, with the additional arrays launching in 2006, 2007, and 2009 onboard the STS-115 and STS-117 missions of Atlantis and the STS-119 mission of Discovery, respectively..<\/p>\n
Due to degradation \u2014 which was expected \u2014 the power-generating arrays now only produce around 160kW of power. At the same time, the Station\u2019s users, including the recently added Nanoracks Bishop airlock and European Bartolomeo external platform, are requiring more power than was originally envisioned at the time of the outpost\u2019s design.<\/p>\n
Whilst the Station\u2019s solar arrays were originally designed to be completely removed and replaced via the Space Shuttle, the retirement of that vehicle forced the ISS program to come up with an innovative solution to increase the amount of available power.<\/p>\n
Spaceflight history books (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});<\/p>\n