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Spacewalk Will Be Difficult, Dangerous
When cosmonauts Vasily Tsibliev and Alexander Lazutkin start their "internal spacewalk" later this month, they will have to work in cramped quarters and have to deal with a potentially hazardous situation inside the Spektr module for repairs that may only restore a fraction of the power lost to the station in last month's collision.
During the repairs, estimated to last between four to eight hours, Tsibliev and Lazutkin will don spacesuits and work in the "node", the module that connects five of the station modules as well as the Soyuz spacecraft. The node will be sealed off from the rest of the station and depressurized during the repairs.
Working in a cramped space, the two will remove the hatch currently in place between the node and the Spektr module and replace it with a new hatch brought up on a Progress resupply spacecraft last week. The new hatch has connectors that will allow the cosmonauts to link power cables from the solar panels attached to Spektr to the rest of the station.
During this time American astronaut Michael Foale will stay in the Soyuz module, ready to make an emergency evacuation with his Russian crewmates should anything serious happen with the repair.
In addition to trying to work in the cramped docking node, the cosmonauts will have to deal with potentially hazardous conditions inside the Spektr module once they remove the current hatch. The module, now in a vacuum, may have broken glass and dangerous chemicals floating around inside.
"It conjures up a picture that you would only find in a science fiction movie," Aviation Week editor Craig Couvault told Reuters. "A U.S.-Russian space crew opens up a dead space station module not knowing what hazards lie behind the door."
The Mir crew also noticed a "mystery leak" into space from the Spektr module a few days after the Progress collision. The crew reported seeing "flakes and bubbles" in a white cloud coming from Spektr. The unidentified leak has not been seen since.
While the loss of the power from Spektr's solar panels cut the station's power in half, restoring the connections will only return a fraction of that power to Mir. The panels will be unable to track the Sun, so the three working panels will provide only 20-30 percent of the power lost in the collision.
"We shouldn't be overly optimistic on how much power they are going to be able to regain," NASA Shuttle-Mir program manager Frank Culbertson said.
Russian mission controllers are trying to foresee all possible events through extensive tests with a mockup of the docking node and hatch in a pool. "Going into open space or going into the Spektr module is highly unpredictable, but we are trying to foresee matters here on Earth," said flight director Vladimir Solovyov.
Although the only goal of this repair is to restore power from Spektr's solar panels, Russian officials are hopeful the rest of the module can be repaired and restored in the future. A replacement crew, scheduled to fly to Mir in August, is testing methods to find and repair the hole in the module which caused the depressurization after the collision.
"We are interested in bringing the Spektr module back to life," Solovyov said.