Balancing on the end of a beam
I watched a fair amount of the recent space walk by Scott Parazynski and Doug Wheelock on NASA TV last night. It was a pretty amazing and difficult walk involving the entire ISS and Discovery crew. Parazynski spent a few hours repairing a solar array which hard torn during deployment. This was part of the recent STS-120 shuttle mission to the space station.
It was a dangerous walk because of risk of electrocution (they couldn’t turn off the solar array) and the fact that Scott would be one hour away from the safety of the station. He needed to ride on the end of a robotic arm which was outstretched as far as it could possibly be in order to reach the array.
This video on the NASA site will show you the movement the arm had to undertake to get Scott to the damage site.
During the telecast, I noticed how amazingly the team worked together. There were no egos, not frights and plenty of great banter. Everyone (including those back on Earth) were happy to defer decisions to those people with the most reliable information at the time. It was quite a pleasure to watch a team work so well together.
I took a heap of screen shots of the cast so here they are each with a brief description:
- Start of the ride
- Discovery docked to the ISS.
- Parazynski attached to the end of the OBSS.
- At the solar array.
- Putting the first cufflink in place.
- View from Doug Wheelock’s wireless camera.
- View from an ISS cameras.
- About to cut the damaged ropes.
- The five cufflinks in place.
- Taking a photograph of himself.
