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Mir Cosmonauts Swap Solar Panels
Two Russian cosmonauts conducted two spacewalks in less than a week outside the Mir space station, replacing a dead solar panel with a new model.
![[image of Mir spacewalk]](images2/mirwalk.jpg)
On Monday, November 3, cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyov and Pavel Vinogradov removed an old solar panel from the Kvant module, which is docked at one end of the core module of the space station. The spacewalk took about six hours.
The spacewalkers encountered problems when trying to return to the station at the end of the spacewalk, however. The outer hatch of the airlock in the Kvant-2 module failed to seal after it was closed, preventing the hatch from pressurizing. The spacewalkers instead used an adjoining compartment in the module as an airlock.
Solovyov and Vinogradov made another six-hour spacewalk November 6, installing a new solar panel on the Kvant module in place of the one they removed three days earlier. The installation went well, although the panel had to be unfolded manually when the automatic deployment system failed.
The spacewalkers noticed when they returned to the airlock that an unknown white substance had formed around the airlock, which may have contributed to its failure to seal earlier in the week. The cosmonauts cleaned off the residue and added extra locks to the hatch to seal it.
By the following week, though, Russian officials reported that the hatch had begun to leak again, but at a slow rate. They said the hatch problem does not jeopardize the crew in any way.
The solar panel upgrade has provided more power to the station, which is aiding the crew in resuming scientific activities as opposed to repair and maintenance work. The extra power now allows all scientific equipment to be turned back on, and Solovyov, Vinogradov, and American astronaut David Wolf are all working on experiments now.
In addition to the solar panel repairs, the spacewalkers also installed a new valve for a Vodzhuk carbon dioxide scrubber. On the November 3 spacewalk Solovyov and Vinogradov also released a one-third scale replica of the Sputnik spacecraft, built as part of a French-Russian project involving students.
The next Mir spacewalk is scheduled for December 5. On the spacewalk Solovyov and Wolf will install scientific experiments on the exterior of the station. A spacewalk to remove a damaged solar panel on Spektr and seal a hole in its hull from a June collision with a Progress spacecraft is being considered for January.