Saturday, May 11, 2013

Space Two astronauts played plumbers weightless - Public Good

on 12/05/2013 at 05:00 | Xavier BROTHER
The two astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Mashburn played handymen weightless in the U.S. segment. Capturing ER screen

Both astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Mashburn played handymen weightless in the U.S. segment. Capture ER

screen

Several hours’ output extravehicular. ” This is the experience of Chris Cassidy and Tom Mashburn, two astronauts who are uprooted yesterday the ISS in their suits to stop a leak. Two pounds of ammonia, used to cool the channels through which passes the electricity produced by the solar panels, escaped Thursday as “the form of flakes.”


ISS before March

This incident was considered “very serious” by a Russian official, while other members of the Russian space agency claimed that there was “nothing critical.” For Norm Knight, flight director for NASA, this spacewalk set a precedent in the history of the agency, taking into account “the very short period between the detection of the leak and the output in the space “. Repair weightless was broadcast live on the web at NASA, and even marked informative tweets from the station commander, Canadian Chris Hadfield.

The first element of this international collaboration (USA, Russia, Europe mainly) was launched in 1998, but especially since 2009, the device has been amplified. Now, six passengers took turns every six months on this platform the size of a football field. Since the start, 208 cosmonauts, astronauts and cosmonauts (three French) have succeeded in the Russian and U.S. “segments”. By Tuesday, a rotation must take place with the return to Earth aboard a Soyuz spacecraft from Mashburn, Hadfield and Russian Romanenko.


ultimate destination

spectacular operation comes just days after a conference at NASA on the exploration of Mars. “A manned flight to Mars is the ultimate destination of humanity in our solar system and the priority of NASA,” said Charles Bolden, his boss, saying that the 2030s could be a possible course. On the ISS, duration missions will also elongated by 2015 from six months to one year. This corresponds, within a few months, the duration of a mission to Mars.

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