At 9:31 a.m. EST, STS-129 spacewalkers Mike Foreman and Randy Bresnik switched their suits to battery power, officially starting today’s six-hour excursion. Atlantis Mission Specialist Robert Satcher will be inside the International Space Station, choreographing the activities and coordinating communications between the spacewalkers and Mission Control in Houston. <\/p>\n
This is the second spacewalk of the mission, the 229th<\/sup> spacewalk conducted by U.S. astronauts, the 135th<\/sup> in support of space station assembly and maintenance, the fifth for Foreman and the first for Bresnik. Foreman is the lead spacewalker and wears a suit with solid red stripes on his legs. His helmet cam displays number 16. Bresnik is wearing a spacesuit with broken red stripes and his helmet cam displays number 18.<\/p>\n Foreman and Bresnik will be working together throughout the spacewalk. First, they will install a Grappling Adaptor to On-Orbit Railing Assembly, or GATOR, on the Columbus laboratory. GATOR contains a ship-tracking antenna system and a HAM radio antenna. They will relocate a floating potential measurement unit that gauges electric charges that build up on the station, deploy a Payload Attach System on the space-facing side of the Starboard 3 truss segment and install a wireless video system that allows spacewalkers to transmit video to the station and relay it to Earth.<\/p>\n The spacewalk was shortened by 30 minutes after an alarm woke the crew Friday night. The only items removed from the spacewalk are “get ahead” tasks that can be performed on a future excursion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At 9:31 a.m. EST, STS-129 spacewalkers Mike Foreman and Randy Bresnik switched their suits to battery power, officially starting today’s six-hour excursion. Atlantis Mission Specialist Robert Satcher will be inside the International Space Station, choreographing the activities and coordinating communications between the spacewalkers and Mission Control in Houston. <\/p>\n This is the second spacewalk of the mission, the 229th<\/sup> spacewalk conducted by U.S. astronauts, the 135th<\/sup> in support of space station assembly and maintenance, the fifth for Foreman and the first for Bresnik. Foreman is the lead spacewalker and wears a suit with solid red stripes on his legs. His helmet cam displays number 16. Bresnik is wearing a spacesuit with broken red stripes and his helmet cam displays number 18.<\/p>\n Foreman and Bresnik will be working together throughout the spacewalk. First, they will install a Grappling Adaptor to On-Orbit Railing Assembly, or GATOR, on the Columbus laboratory. GATOR contains a ship-tracking antenna system and a HAM radio antenna. They will relocate a floating potential measurement unit that gauges electric charges that build up on the station, deploy a Payload Attach System on the space-facing side of the Starboard 3 truss segment and install a wireless video system that allows spacewalkers to transmit video to the station and relay it to Earth.<\/p>\n The spacewalk was shortened by 30 minutes after an alarm woke the crew Friday night. The only items removed from the spacewalk are “get ahead” tasks that can be performed on a future excursion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":612598,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-shuttle-update"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/612598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}