Moscow December 24 (Reuters) -. U.S. astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins came out today for the second time into space to repair the cooling system of the International Space Station (ISS), NASA
.
Mastracchio and Hopkins are tasked to install an ammonia pump module to replace one damaged, that they withdrew from the output that made last Saturday.
two astronauts went to space extravehicular at 11.53 GMT, seven minutes ahead of schedule, as was seen in the website of NASA, which broadcast live development work on the hull of the ISS.
is expected to be out today for approximately six hours and a half.
Initially, NASA scheduled to open three outlets to repair the cooling system space, but due to the progress made during the first of these engineers monitoring mission considered that the work could be concluded today.
This is the 176th spacewalk conducting operations astronauts to repair and maintenance of the ISS, which was launched in 1998 and has been operating since November 2000.
Cooling is crucial to the operations of the ISS and while only one of the devices can support critical systems and maintain the laboratory operations, are needed both to avoid blackouts nonessential equipment.
breakdown, reported on Dec. 11 when NASA detected an abnormal temperature in an external pump, had no serious consequences for the ISS, but forced to suspend all non-essential operations research lab space platform , orbiting 420 miles above Earth.
Although the six astronauts on the ISS now reside are not endangered by the problem in the cooling system, have been cut board activities, especially in the laboratory that has stopped all investigations.
Besides
Mastracchio and Hopkins, the current ISS crew compose Japanese Koichi Wakata and Russian Oleg Kotov, with the rank of major, Mikhail Tiurin and Sergey Ryazanskiy.EFE
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