WASHINGTON — Astronauts patched a damaged solar panel on the international space station Saturday during a tricky and dangerous seven-hour spacewalk.
Perched on the tip of an extension on the station’s robot arm, astronaut Scott Parazynski snipped off tangles of broken and frayed wires that had ripped open two spots on the giant solar array and installed five jury-rigged straps to reinforce the damaged area, allowing the panel to finally fully unfurl.
“Excellent work, guys, excellent,” space station commander Peggy Whitson said after the tense, painstaking job was done.
The spacewalk was considered unusually risky because Parazynski ventured farther from the safety of the station than ever before. The repairs were unusually complicated because the astronauts were unable to fully assess the damage before getting close to the array and had to hope their quickly improvised repair plans would work. Normally such a repair mission would take weeks or even months of preparation and rehearsal.
But without the repairs, the damaged solar wing could have become structurally unstable, posing a hazard to the outpost and requiring it to be jettisoned. Without the panel, the station would not have enough power to continue expanding.
That could have forced a postponement of the installation of the next component, a European lab, next month. NASA is under pressure to complete the construction of the station before retiring the aging space shuttle fleet in 2010.
So, wearing protective spacesuits, Parazynski and astronaut Doug Wheelock ventured out of the station orbiting about 213 miles above the East Coast to begin the unprecedented job.
“Go out there and fix that thing for us,” Whitson radioed just before the pair left the safety of the station’s airlock.
With Wheelock positioned at the base of the giant solar array, Parazynski anchored his feet to the end of a 50-foot boom from the space shuttle grasped in the middle by the station’s 58-foot-long robot arm. The arm then carried him on a slow-motion 45-minute trip half a football field away to just barely in reach of the damaged panel. Dramatic live TV images showed Parazynski atop the extended arm with the bright orange solar array behind him and brilliant blue and white Earth passing below.
Once there, Parazynski assessed the full extent of the damage for the first time, describing a daunting “hairball” of tangled wires in the area that was mangled when the solar panel was deployed Tuesday. The panel suffered two tears, the largest about 2 1/2 feet long.
All the tools plus the metal parts of Parazynski’s spacesuit were wrapped with insulating tape to minimize the risk he would get shocked by the array, which is generating 160 volts.
Parazynski, 46, a native of Little Rock, Ark., considers Palo Alto, Calif., and Evergreen his hometowns.
He was in the midst of an emergency medicine residency at Denver General Hospital, now Denver Health, in 1992 when he was accepted into the astronaut corps.
