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One of the International Space Station’s two cooling loops shut down Saturday night, prompting NASA to power down backup equipment for several key systems. The six people currently stationed on the orbital outpost are not in any danger, but NASA will need to take some action soon to restore redundancy.
“This is not something we want to linger over,” said NASA spokesman Rob Navias, with the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Engineers tried restarting the cooling loop’s failed pump on Sunday, with no success.
There are spare pumps stored outside the station, but replacing the unit would require at least one and more likely two spacewalks by station crewmembers.
Coincidentally, astronauts Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson had been scheduled to make a spacewalk on Thursday to install part of a robotic crane and to configure the outpost to receive an equipment storage module that is due to arrive in November aboard space shuttle Discovery.
The loss of the cooling system triggered the shutdown of several pieces of equipment, including two of the station’s four gyroscopes, which keep the complex properly orientated in orbit, one of two S-band communications systems, one of two Global Positioning System receivers, power converters and routers.
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