Two astronauts repaired a cooling system on the ISS - The País.com (Spain)

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Hands astronaut Rick Mastracchio repair equipment damaged. / AP / NASA

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U.S. astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins has left the International Space Station (ISS) in the first of three days of work to repair a cooling system. The operation, which started at 13.10 (CET Spanish) and will last about six hours and a half. The other two outlets to complete the repair will be on 23 and 25 December at the same time.

In this first outing

Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata is responsible for managing the ISS robotic arm that has placed the other two astronauts on-site repair. The fault is located in a valve of the cooling system pumps the ISS and began on 11 December. After some attempts to solve it from the ground, mission managers decided to send astronauts to replace the module, which is the size of a refrigerator and weighs 350 kilograms. Mastracchio and Hopkins withdraw this module and replace it with a spare stored in the ISS.

The six astronauts living on the station are not at risk for this problem but have been forced to cut activities aboard the station. If another accident disable the second section of the cooling system, then the crew should be evacuated in a Soyuz spacecraft to return to Earth.

ISS, which orbits the Earth at about 385 miles away and 27.0900 kilometers per hour, is equipped with two external and independent refrigeration systems that use ammonia to dissipate the heat generated by the electrical systems of the laboratory.

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