In preparation for his Beyond mission, ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano was at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, USA, in March 2019.
His training included spacewalk, or Extravehicular Activity (EVA), training.
In building 9 of the Space Center Luca worked with the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility taking a class on the maintenance of the spacewalk suits called Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMU).
This training is important as Luca has some spacewalks planned to repair the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer particle detector. The antimatter hunter was launched 16 May 2011 aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour mission STS-134. In a year it records more than 17 billion cosmic rays, particles, and nuclei with energies up to 1 trillion electron volts. The results have shown unexpected phenomena not predicted by cosmic ray models—and changing our understanding of the cosmos.
The mission was initially meant to run for only three years but has been so successful that its mission life has been extended. However three of the four cooling pumps have stopped functioning requiring a repair.
To repair the Spectromoter a series of spacewalks are planned to replace the cooling system for the $2 billion instrument, a cooling system which was never designed to be replaced in space.
The first spacewalk is intended to determine just how and where to intervene, and what tools will be needed during this process.
Luca already has two spacewalks under his belt and is planned to take part of this repair effort.
Luca will go beyond Earht’s atmosphere when he returns to the International Space Station in 2019 as part of Expedition 60/61, alongside NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan and Roscosmos astronaut Alexander Skvortsov.
Luca was the first of the 2009 astronaut class to fly to the Space Station. His first mission Volare, meaning ‘to fly’ in Italian, took place in 2013 and lasted 166 days, during which time Luca conducted two spacewalks and many experiments that are still running today.