On the Bottom Half

All kinds of unexpected goings-on...

Things on STS-120 were going smoothly until the redeploy of the P6 solar arrays after their repositioning during the most recent spacewalk. One of the sets of arrays was at about 80% deployed when this was noticed:

That's ugly and bad. The brown honeycomb-like sheet across the bottom 1/2 of the picture is the array, which folds accordion-like (concertina-like for Aussie readers) to be retracted. The scaffolding across the top of the picture is indeed scaffolding which supports the array when it is extended. The tear and buckling is not good. I'm sure the arrays have been engineered with bypass circuitry to limit the effect of this sort of damage, but I doubt that they can trust the array to hold together under stress at full deployment.

Following the third spacewalk during cleanup activities onboard the orbiter/station complex Doug Wheelock found a hole in one of his spacesuit gloves. Pictures of that have been sent down for closer inspection by the experts, presumably the folks at Hamilton-Sundstrand - the makers of the spacesuits - if the damage looks severe enough.

Rewinding a little, the inspection work performed in the first spacewalk of the dicky array rotary joint found metal filings and excessive wear in the joint. Managers have decided to limit the motion of that particular array to prevent total failure while they try to find a fix.

Other than those three little problems, everything else is going off without a hitch.

*Update*

It turns out that even with the torn array at 80% of its total possible extension, it is still producing 95% of the power that it would be producing were it fully extended. So long as they can stabilise the tear and be reasonably sure that it won't propagate or cause long-term power problems, I'm thinking... she'll be right mate! The most pressing issue is definitely the filings/drag on the rotary joint. No words on what to do about that yet.

posted by Kyle @ 18:12