No place like home for the holidays? Two American astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) will be floating outside their orbiting home on Christmas Eve. While a Saturday space walk to repair the orbiting laboratory’s faulty cooling pump was completed ahead of schedule, water leaks still plague one space-walk spacesuit. As a result,...
Tensions are high as the astronauts aboard the International Space Station ready themselves to conduct a series of emergency spacewalks that start this weekend, ones intended to correct a critical cooling system failure. Acting much like a car’s radiator, the malfunctioning cooling pump prevents overheating of electronics and science experiments aboard the ISS. With one...
An hour into this morning’s scheduled six-hour-long spacewalk to do maintenance work on the International Space Station, astronaut Luca Parmitano’s helmet began inexplicably filling with water. At first Parmitano, a major in the Italian Air Force, notified ground controllers that he was feeling something unusual on the back of his head. “My head is really...