NASA says that most of the missions planned for this spacewalk have been carried out, and that the fourth spacewalk has been postponed from Friday to Saturday
Mastracino's glove and the hole in the left thumb, enlarged. Photo: NASA
The control center instructed Endeavor crew members that the fourth spacewalk of mission STS-118, scheduled for Friday, was moved to Saturday. This decision gives the astronauts an extra day to prepare for this spacewalk, which was added to the mission only after the shuttle's arrival at the International Space Station.
Mission managers in Houston continue to consider whether a spacewalk will be necessary to repair the small dent discovered in the heat shield on the lower part of the shuttle. Before they went to bed tonight, the crew members were told that the managers had decided that the spacewalk was postponed from Friday to Saturday, but that it had not yet been decided whether it would include the repair of the heat shield or pre-planned missions on the space station.
Yesterday (Wednesday), around ten o'clock, the people of the control center at NASA decided to bring forward the return of the astronauts to the space station due to damage to the outer layer of one of the gloves worn by astronaut Rick Mastracino. Although there was no threat to Mastracino's safety, it was decided to return them as a precautionary measure.
Up to this point, Mastracchino and Clay Anderson were ahead of schedule and had completed most of the major tasks planned for the spacewalk. Mastracino returned to the ferry at three o'clock EST (6 o'clock in the evening), while Anderson remained alone for a little over an hour and continued his work. Anderson completed retrieving the transmitter from the PXNUMX component after Mastracino returned to station.
The damage was discovered during a routine scan of the gloves using Mastracino's helmet camera. It turns out that both gloves were damaged, but the left glove had a small intrusion of some kind of bone in the outer layer of the thumb on his left hand, which caused the flight controllers to end the spacewalk earlier.
The return of two experiments, called MISSEs, from the outside of the space station inside has been postponed to a future spacewalk. The experiments were installed outside the station in August 2006, and will be returned to Earth for analysis.
Before the cessation of activity, the two had time to begin preparations for re-copying the P6 component and the solar collectors on it, by moving wagons containing equipment to assist the spacewalkers along the track adjacent to the station's main axis. This will allow the shuttle arm to do the job of moving the component during the STS-120 mission. Component P6 will be copied from the head of the station to the end of component P6 and will extend the main corridor of the station.
Earlier, the two moved an antenna from P6 to P1, and installed a transmitter and signal processor for S-Band communication, also in the P1 component.
