Today Terry and I were joined by my fellow Shenanigan Alex in a class on planned in-flight maintenance tasks.
Actually, although Alex just arrived in Japan, I guess you could say that it’s the two of us who joined him: as his backup crew, we learned about the maintenance activities that are planned for Alex’ increment this summer.
One of the most important ones is the likely replacement of a cooling pump inside the Japanese laboratory JEM. Like the other modules, JEM has two cooling loops set at different temperatures: the LTL (Low Temperature Loop) and the MTL (Medium Temperature Loop). Each loop has its own pump to circulate the cooling water and nominally the loops are separate.
However, the JEM LTL pump has been misbehaving lately. Troubleshooting is ongoing and the loops are currently connected, with water being circulated by the MTL pump only. Although all operations in the JEM can be run nominally, this is a rather uncomfortable condition to be in, because there is no redundancy. A replacement of the LTL pump with a spare might become necessary.
As we learned today, the most complicated thing in this operation is the rotation of the Deck1 rack to gain access to the pump. In the recent snapshot from the onboard camera you can see the rack rotated to allow the ongoing troubleshooting efforts. What makes it quite time-consuming is that a number of ventilation ducts running between the rack and the endcone need to be disconnected at somewhat hard-to-reach locations. Sometimes being a good astronaut is about finding the right body position to reach a bolt in a tight space!
(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/
03/03/2014