Floating in the International Space Station's Quest airlock module, veteran astronauts Tracy Dyson and Mike Barrett were preparing to lift off into space Monday to complete their spacewalk, a trip that was aborted June 13 when Dyson reported water leaking from his spacesuit's cooling system and said there was “literally water everywhere.”
The leak was stopped when Dyson reconnected the umbilicals supplying the station with power, cooling water and oxygen. The airlock was re-pressurized, its interior was opened and Astronaut He walked into the airlock's inner chamber, where crew members stood by to help him out of his bulky spacesuit.
NASA said Dyson and Barrett were never in any danger.
NASA
The leak began just as the crew switched their spacesuits to battery power at 8:46 a.m. EDT and officially began the planned six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk. Just moments after switching to battery power, cold water began gushing out of Dyson's suit.
“Oh, my gosh,” Dyson said when he saw the water gushing out.
“Oh, wow,” Barrett agreed.
Dyson told flight controllers, “I have water flowing out of my SCU (service and cooling umbilical).” The umbilical supplies cooling water, oxygen and power until a crew member disconnects it to exit the airlock.
“There's a lot of water flowing,” Dyson said, adding later, “There's literally water everywhere. … I have ice on my helmet.”
The umbilical was reconfigured and the leak stopped. After closing the outer hatch of the airlock, the compartment was re-pressurized so that the astronauts could return to the station.
Although they never floated out, Dyson and Barrett were credited with a 31-minute spacewalk. This is the time between switching their spacesuits to internal batteries and reconnecting them to the station's power.
Barrett already holds the record for the shortest spacewalk, lasting 12 minutes in the vacuum inside the space station's Russian segment in 2009, when he and astronaut Gennady Padalka installed a docking mechanism in place of a hatch.
That record still stands.
“And Mike, you already have the shortest EVA that I know of, but that doesn't count today. So your old record still stands,” astronaut Steve Bowen radioed from mission control.
“Awesome,” Barrett said, laughing. “To report that this was the shortest completed — and successful — EVA on record.”
NASA
Dyson has so far flown four spacewalks, taking a total of 23 hours and 20 minutes, while Barrett has flown three EVAs, taking a total of five hours and 37 minutes. Total station spacewalk time through 271 EVAs is 1,715 hours and 56 minutes, or 71 days 11 hours 56 minutes.
This was the second consecutive spacewalk that was aborted before the astronauts could exit the airlock.
Dyson and astronaut Matthew Dominick originally planned a similar trip on June 13, but the spacewalk was canceled after Dominick reported an “uncomfortable problem” with the suit. No details were given.
Dyson and Barrett already had been selected for a second spacewalk, or EVA, and NASA managers decided Monday to continue with the same schedule for the second spacewalk.
The mission was to retrieve a damaged radio transmitter and antenna package, known as a Radio Frequency Group, or RFG, which two previous attempts to unfreeze from a storage platform had failed.
Dyson also planned to destroy several targeted areas near the station's US airlock and certain vents in order to collect samples of microbes that might survive the extreme temperatures, radiation and vacuum of open space.
If researchers find any such organisms after samples are sent back to Earth, it could help engineers find ways to prevent similar biocontamination on Mars during future missions to the Red Planet.
If the spacewalk went smoothly, NASA plans to conduct another EVA on July 2. It is not yet known how the water leak problem will affect the spacewalk schedule, or what will need to be done to correct the problem.