Sorry for the long interruption in the logbook, but it’s been a really busy training week here at the Johnson Space Center!
In the last logbook I told you about the upcoming vacuum chamber run, so first of all, if you’re wondering how that went… well, we had to interrupt the altitude run yesterday because of a technical issue, so the event will have to be rescheduled. I’ll tell you more soon!
But today let me tell you about the training day last Friday at the Neutral Buoyancy Facility, the giant pool in which we practice spacewalks underwater. With veteran spacewalker Randy Bresnick I practiced a LEE R&R. LEE is the Latching End Effector, the component at the end of the robotic arm that can capture a grapple fixture, for example on a cargo vehicle, and make a rigid connection with it. For some pictures check out this older logbook.
R&R stands for Remove and Replace: remove a failed unit, install a spare. So, the goal last Friday was to practice removing a failed LEE from the robotic arm and replace it with the POA – that’s an end effector that is identical to the ones at the extremities of the arm, but it’s located on the Mobile Transporter instead and is used to temporarily stow big units, if they have a grapple fixture.
There are some situations in which this swap would make sense, because an end effector might be degraded in such a way that it can not capture reliably a visiting vehicle, but it can still work fine as a POA for temporary stowage.
In this picture you can see all the POA just below the base of the robotic arm. As you can see, it looks just like the arm end-effectors:
Photo: removing one of the six bolts that attach the POA (or rather it’s NBL mockup) to its install location on the Mobile Transporter. (Credit: NASA)
Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42
avamposto42.esa.int
(Trad IT) Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui:
https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/
(Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí:
https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/
(Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici:
https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/
16/07/2014