NASA astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer are preparing for a hastily-scheduled spacewalk to repair a faulty part on the International Space Station (ISS).
The “contingency spacewalk,” which will take place on Tuesday morning, is aimed at removing and replacing a part known as the Multiplexer-Demultiplexer (MDM), which failed on Saturday morning. The cause of the failure is not known, NASA said in a blog post on Sunday.
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While this is not an emergency situation — no lives are at risk on the Space Station as a result of the outage — but having backup systems is critical to the operation of the orbiting laboratory. The MDM is used to keep solar arrays, radiators, and other systems functioning properly. Read more…
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