. Mark Vande Hei was watching from the outside of the station as he worked through his 341st space day to set a new U.S. astronaut single-flight record.
Scott Kelly, a retired astronaut, spent 340 days and eight hours in orbit over a nearly one-year-long station stay between 2015-16. This was easily the longest single flight of a NASA astronaut.
Vande Hei, a veteran of a 168-day earlier mission, has surpassed Kelly’s Tuesday mark and is expected to have logged a total of 355 days off the planet when he returns to Earth on March 30 aboard a Russian Soyuz satellite.
After a successful spacewalk Tuesday that lasted six hours and 54 minutes, astronaut Kayla Barron stated that Mark Vande Hei holds the record for American spaceflight’s longest continuous duration. It’s a team effort to have Mark here for this year. He and the team deserve my congratulations for an amazing day.
Kelly stated that she thinks it’s fantastic in a recent interview with CBS News. According to the old saying, records can be broken. This means that we are doing things better than ever before. He deserves our congratulations.
NASA managers stated that the conflict in Ukraine , and tensions between Russia and the United States continue to be a concern. They also said that both countries are continuing to work together to operate the International Space Station. Vande Hei and two Russian cosmonauts will return home as planned.
Joel Montalbano (space station program manager), said Monday that “I can assure you Mark is returning home on that Soyuz.” “We are in contact with our Russian colleagues. There’s no fuzz. Three crew members are returning home.
At 8:12 AM, Raja Chari and Barron switched their spacesuits from battery to recharge at the space station. ET will officially launch the second of 16 planned spacewalks (or EVAs) this year. Six of the six will be performed by NASA astronauts who are working on power upgrades, and 10 by cosmonauts who are outfitting new Russian labs and docking stations.
Tuesday’s excursion had the goal of installing support brackets at a right-side solar wing’s base so that new ISS rollout solar array blankets (IROSAs) can be attached later in the year to provide more power to the station’s electrical system.
The original space station had four solar array wings. Two on each side of the long truss stretched as far as a football field. Each wing is composed of two blankets measuring 39 feet wide and 112 feet each. The oldest wing was launched December 2000, while the newest was launched in 2009.
Eight circuits are fed by the arrays, one per wing. The arrays charge batteries and supply power to the many lab systems. The batteries provide stored power to the station during nighttime.
In a $103 million upgrade, NASA will add six blankets to protect solar cells. The new IROSA blankets measure 20 ft wide by 63 ft long when extended fully at an angle to their underlying wings.
Two IROSA blankets, the first two, were placed on the left-outboard solar wing. They were used to supplement power channels 2B & 4B. A September EVA saw the installation of brackets to support IROSA blankets in the left inboard channel 4A array.
Tuesday’s spacewalk was dedicated to the installation of support brackets at the base the power channel 3A wings on the right-side solar wing. It went smoothly and was ready for attaching the new solar blankets later in the year.
If everything goes according to plan, the final IROSA blankets for the complete upgrade will be installed next spring on the right side power truss.
“Over the next year, or year and half or so, we will install all the different arrays,” stated Dina Contella (space station operations integration manager at Johnson Space Center).
“These new arrays are a good replacement for the legacy arrays. All told, after upgrading six channels, we will be able to increase power generation from 160 kilowatts up to 215 kilowatts.”
