ISS Suffers Power System Damage

Cape Canaveral (EON) - During a spacewalk, astronauts found a significant amount of damage to an important part of the power system of the International Space Station.
This was the second of five scheduled spacewalks during the NASA shuttle Discovery mission.

The spacewalk was expected to last over six hours with the astronauts working out in space trying to remove a solar array from the top of the ISS. They wanted to unmount it so that they could move it to the side of the station.

They also needed to continue to work on the brand new “Harmony” module. This was the key aspect of the Discovery mission as it is going to allow various new laboratories from Europe to connect up to the International Space Station.

The Solar Array Rotating Joint or SARJ sits toward each end of the station’s truss. Daniel Tani who was one of the two spacewalkers stated that “It’s quite clear, there’s metal-to-metal scraping, or something, and it’s widespread.”

Mission managers added the inspection to the spacewalk schedule on Friday but stated that it is still unclear as to the level of damage. Kirk Shireman stated that there are backup motors and controllers for each rotary joint. Shireman is the deputy space station program manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA is continuing to look into the problem as Derek Hassman who is the lead space station flight director stated “As long as we can get it into an attitude that’s reasonably good for power generation, combined with what the other SARJ can produce, we wouldn’t have any significant power impacts that we couldn’t deal with.”