Whoa...now am dreaming bout my mornign walk.....
The astronauts — Daniel C. Burbank, a Coast Guard commander, and Steven G. MacLean of the Canadian Space Agency — got to work at 5:05 a.m. Eastern time, preparing the space station’s new solar arrays to be deployed. Each was on his second shuttle mission, but his first spacewalk.
They removed 14 devices known as launch locks, and 6 known as launch restraints, which had held the rotating joint for the new solar arrays securely in place during the heavy vibration of launch. Doing so freed the joint to allow the 240-foot-long solar array to rotate and face the sun as the station circles the earth.
It was repetitive work. Each launch lock is held in place by as many as nine bolts, and each has a cover secured with more bolts.
That “get-ahead” work led to the one stumble in that spacewalk: a spring-loaded bolt got away from Mr. Tanner as he worked, and raised initial concerns that it might become lodged in the rotary joint. Before long, though, analysts on the ground determined that the 1.5-inch bolt and its spring and washer had actually floated harmlessly away.
About two hours into today’s spacewalk, another bolt got away, this time from Mr. MacLean. He reported that one of the four bolts that fasten an insulation cover over a launch lock had gone missing while he had the cover off to remove a lock. He noticed that the bolt was missing as he reattached the cover. “I did not see the bolt go,” he said. “I pulled the launch cover off, all three bolts were there.”
Ground control asked Mr. MacLean to remove the insulation cover over the lock and see if the washer was floating inside.
“I’m looking inside the whole structure here trying to see if anything’s floating,” he said.” Nothing is catching my light inside the structure, nothing at all that looks like a washer.”
Ground crews then had Mr. MacLean search inside the structure for the bolt and washer, but ultimately decided that since all of the other covers were in place, those bits of metal could not have floated into the structure; they had him reattach the cover and move on.
Astronauts commonly lose small objects in their work. In the last shuttle mission, astronaut Piers Sellers lost one of the spatulas that he and partner Mike Fossum were using to test shuttle repair techniques. “It was my favorite spatula,” Mr. Sellers joked during the mission.
John McCullough, the lead flight director for the station, said in a briefing on Tuesday that on Russian spacewalks, “they throw things away all the time” into the void.
Later in today’s spacewalk, Mr. MacLean struggled with a balky bolt — another problem familiar to any weekend handyman, but one with potentially serious consequences for the station.
At first, the extension on a pistol-grip power tool broke under the strain of trying to budge the bolt. “Son of a gun,” Mr. McLean said, exercising more verbal restraint than weekend handymen normally employ.
He stowed the broken bits and went back to get a replacement, and Mr. Burbank joined him to work a wrench with a “cheater bar” extension to try to budge the bolt.
With both of them groaning with the effort, Mr. Burbank said, “Oh, there goes!” and they accomplished one-eighth of a turn. That began the slow and arduous process of removal.
“Be careful with that — where it breaks could be really bad,” said Mr. Tanner, communicating with the spacewalkers from Atlantis.
In fact, “really bad” was an understatement, since a stuck or sheared bolt could have made it impossible to remove a launch restraint, leaving the rotating joint immobilized. And that would have prevented the deployment of the solar arrays on Thursday, with the potential for more lengthy delays.
The astronauts cheered when they finally removed the bolt, and one of the participants in the discussion said, “Now there was much rejoicing.”
Pam Melroy, the astronaut communicating with the shuttle from the ground, said, “And we appreciate your answering that age-old question” for mission control, “how many astronauts does it take to unscrew a bolt? And apparently it takes three, two outside and one inside. We’re very pleased, you guys did an awesome job and that was great teamwork.”