Space Station Crew Members Walk in Space with an Eye to the Future
Expedition 50 Commander Shane Kimbrough of NASA and Flight Engineer Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency conducted a spacewalk outside the International Space Station March 24 to disconnect cables and electrical connections on Pressurized Mating Adapter-3 (PMA-3), lubricate the latching end effector on the Canadarm2 robotic arm and replace a computer relay box on the station’s truss. PMA-3 will be robotically relocated March 30 by ground controllers from the port side of the Tranquility module to the space-facing side of the Harmony module for the future installation of a second International Docking Adapter that will accommodate the arrivals of commercial crew vehicles. The spacewalk is the first of three planned in a two-week period for station crewmembers that will see PMA-3 reconnected to its new location on Harmony and an avionics box replaced that routes electricity and data to station experiments.
