Two Nasa astronauts set for spacewalk to replace faulty space station antenna

Workers pressure wash the logo of NASA on the Vehicle Assembly Building before SpaceX will send two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station aboard its Falcon 9 rocket, at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., May 19, 2020. REUTERS FILE PHOTO

Two U.S. astronauts were set on Tuesday

to venture out of the International Space Station for a

spacewalk to replace a failed antenna, facing what Nasa

officials say is a slightly elevated risk from the debris of a


Russian anti-satellite missile test.

Nasa TV planned to provide live coverage of the 6-1/2-hour

spacewalk, scheduled to begin at 7:10 a.m. Eastern time (1210

GMT) as astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Brown exit an

airlock of the orbiting research lab some 250 miles (402 km)

above Earth.


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The outing is the fifth spacewalk for Marshburn, 61, a

medical doctor and former flight surgeon with two previous trips

to orbit, and the first for Barron, 34, a U.S. Navy submarine

officer and nuclear engineer on her debut spaceflight for Nasa.

Their objective is to remove a faulty S-band radio

communications antenna assembly, now more than 20 years old, and

replace it with a new spare stowed outside the space station.

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The malfunctioning antenna recently lost its ability to send

signals to Earth. Though other antennae on the space station can

perform the same function, mission managers decided to install

the replacement to ensure communications redundancy, Nasa said.

Marshburn will work with Barron while positioned at the end

of a robotic arm operated from inside the station by German

astronaut Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency, with

help from Nasa crewmate Raja Chari.

The four arrived at the space station Nov. 11 in a SpaceX

Crew Dragon capsule launched from the Kennedy Space Center in

Cape Canaveral, Florida, joining two Russian cosmonauts and a

Nasa astronaut already aboard the orbiting outpost.

Four days later, an anti-satellite missile test conducted

without warning by Russia generated a debris field in low-Earth

orbit, and all seven crew members took shelter in their docked

spaceships to allow for a quick getaway until the immediate

danger passed, according to Nasa.

The residual cloud of debris from the blasted satellite has

dispersed since then, according to Dana Weigel, NASA deputy

manager of the International Space Station (ISS) program.

But Nasa calculates that remaining fragments continue to

pose a “slightly elevated” background risk to the space station

as a whole, and a 7% higher risk of spacewalkers’ suits being

punctured, as compared to before Russia’s missile test, Weigel

told reporters on Monday.

Although Nasa has yet to fully quantify additional hazards

posed by more than 1,700 larger fragments it is tracking around

the station’s orbit, the 7% higher risk to spacewalkers falls

“well within” fluctuations previously seen in “the natural

environment,” Weigel said.


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Still, mission managers canceled several smaller maintenance

tasks under consideration for Tuesday’s spacewalk, Weigel added.

Tuesday’s exercise marks the 245th spacewalk in support of

assembly, maintenance and upgrades of the space station, which

this month surpassed 21 years of continuous human presence, Nasa

said.

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