Astronauts To Repair Cooling System On ISS 57
GWMAW writes "NASA Astronauts will conduct a spacewalk on Thursday to repair part of the cooling system of the International Space Station. The cooling system is essential for maintaining the temperature inside the station. There are two 'loops' in the system, one that uses water and draws heat from the inside of the station, and one uses ammonia and dumps the heat into space. Ammonia is used because it freezes at a much lower temperature than water. On Saturday the pump that controls the flow of ammonia through the system shut down."
Re:Well that's nice (Score:5, Insightful)
I think its great that mundane repairs are being done on a real, fair dinkum space station, and there is nothing interesting to say about it.
Why is loops in quotes? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is loops in quotes? If the concept of a control loop is too complex/obscure for the slashdot crowd, just call it a sub-system a la Star Trek.
Re:The press release. (Score:2, Insightful)
If this were a Russian failure they would have been out the airlock the same day. They're trained for that, in Russian they call it: .
I think a better question is: what is NASA going to do when the ISS sized vehicle they want to go to Mars in has a similar issue? Spend a few days worrying about it and calling back to Earth then go replace it with a spare and hope the spare doesn't break? Sooner or later they're going to have to break their addiction with resupply and ground based mission control. I say, do it sooner. Make the ISS self sufficient for at least 12 months at a time.