Adventure in Space: ISS Astronauts Install Fifth Roll-out Solar Blanket to Boost Power (cbsnews.com) 25
The international space station is equpped with four 39-foot blankets (11.8-meters), reports CBS News. The first one was delivered in December of 2000 — and now it's time for some changes:
Two astronauts ventured outside the International Space Station Friday and installed the fifth of six roll-out solar array blankets — iROSAs — needed to offset age-related degradation and micrometeoroid damage to the lab's original solar wings.
Floating in the Quest airlock, veteran Stephen Bowen, making his ninth spacewalk, and crewmate Woody Hoburg, making his first, switched their spacesuits to battery power at 9:25 a.m. EDT, officially kicking off the 264th spacewalk devoted to ISS assembly and maintenance and the seventh so far this year. NASA is in the process of upgrading the ISS's solar power system by adding six iROSAs to the lab's eight existing U.S. arrays. The first four roll-out blankets were installed during spacewalks in 2021 and 2022. Bowen and Hoburg installed the fifth during Friday's spacewalk and plan to deploy the sixth during another excursion next Thursday.
The two new iROSAs were delivered to the space station earlier this week in the unpressurized trunk section of a SpaceX cargo Dragon. The lab's robot arm pulled them out Wednesday and mounted them on the right side of the station's power truss just inboard the starboard wings... As the station sailed 260 miles above the Great Lakes, the 63-foot-long solar array slowly unwound like a window shade to its full length. Well ahead of schedule by that point, the spacewalkers carried out a variety of get-ahead tasks to save time next week when they float back outside to install the second new iROSA.
They returned to the airlock and began re-pressurization procedures at 3:28 p.m., bringing the 6-hour three-minute spacewalk to a close. With nine spacewalks totaling 60 hours and 22 minutes under his belt, Bowen now ranks fifth on the list of the world's most experienced spacewalkers.
"Combined with the 95-kilowatt output of the original eight panels, the station's upgraded system will provide about 215,000 kilowatts of power."
Floating in the Quest airlock, veteran Stephen Bowen, making his ninth spacewalk, and crewmate Woody Hoburg, making his first, switched their spacesuits to battery power at 9:25 a.m. EDT, officially kicking off the 264th spacewalk devoted to ISS assembly and maintenance and the seventh so far this year. NASA is in the process of upgrading the ISS's solar power system by adding six iROSAs to the lab's eight existing U.S. arrays. The first four roll-out blankets were installed during spacewalks in 2021 and 2022. Bowen and Hoburg installed the fifth during Friday's spacewalk and plan to deploy the sixth during another excursion next Thursday.
The two new iROSAs were delivered to the space station earlier this week in the unpressurized trunk section of a SpaceX cargo Dragon. The lab's robot arm pulled them out Wednesday and mounted them on the right side of the station's power truss just inboard the starboard wings... As the station sailed 260 miles above the Great Lakes, the 63-foot-long solar array slowly unwound like a window shade to its full length. Well ahead of schedule by that point, the spacewalkers carried out a variety of get-ahead tasks to save time next week when they float back outside to install the second new iROSA.
They returned to the airlock and began re-pressurization procedures at 3:28 p.m., bringing the 6-hour three-minute spacewalk to a close. With nine spacewalks totaling 60 hours and 22 minutes under his belt, Bowen now ranks fifth on the list of the world's most experienced spacewalkers.
"Combined with the 95-kilowatt output of the original eight panels, the station's upgraded system will provide about 215,000 kilowatts of power."
...and those changes are...? (Score:2)
Power output (Score:5, Informative)
"Combined with the 95-kilowatt output of the original eight panels, the station's upgraded system will provide about 215,000 kilowatts of power."
That should be 250 kW [nasa.gov], not 215,000 kW...
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I was wondering... is the sun THAT bright up there?
Yes...no air pollution up there.
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I was wondering about that. A space station would need a nuclear reactor to generate 215 MW.
Why stop there? If they install a nuclear reactor on the space station, I fully expect it to generate 1.21 gigawatts.
Re: Power output (Score:2)
The astronauts had to get that much power because they had to get MORE than just ESPN
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This article dictated but not read.
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Wonder what they're doing with all that power? 215kw is quite a bit of power.
Re:Power output (Score:4, Interesting)
Thinking on it:
1. Running the computers
2. Running life support systems - fans, pumps, cooling systems, radiators, filters, etc... Keeping the station liveable it complicated.
3. Running experiments - like the 3D printer they sent up.
4. Lights and such (shouldn't be much)
5. Divide everything by 2 or so because the station will be occluded roughly 50% of the time by the Earth. Also things like having to retract the panels, or turn them to protect them, etc... So they charge the batteries.
That being said, they may be able to run most of that with the original panels, but these are designed to be able to replace the original panels, in case they stop working, or they decide to replace them, etc...
The extra capacity may also enable additional experiments. Some sort of LED lit greenhouse, perhaps. Try growing food up there using aeroponics.
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It's interesting that they changed to using lithium ion batteries. Rated for 60k cycles, which in an EV would be in excess of 15 million kilometres.
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It's orbiting around the Earth every ~90 minutes. That's about 6k cycles/year. Now, I imagine that they're partial cycles, and "rated for 60k cycles" doesn't mean that they quit working at that point, just that they might be down to 80% capacity or such. Plus, with LiIon, discharging from, say, 80% to 70% and then charging it back up to 80% is worth much less than 10% of the wear that a 100-0-100% full cycle causes. Which EV owners are discovering, generally exceeding ratings by quite a bit.
Meanwhile, t
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Waaah? How are the going to power that ion-beam cannon on the US side with _that_?
great (Score:1)
Just curious (Score:2)
Since the original panels were rated for 95KW and the goal is to now have 215KW with the ROSAs, why the need other than the purported damage? No new modules are planned for ISS. I'm not seeing the extra power need for 7 more years of operational life.
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There's a LOT of new modules planned for the ISS - they're using it as an orbital beachhead in the construction of a new space station, which once fully operational and self-sufficient will separate and allow the old station to be decommissioned. I want to say there's something like 5-10 new modules being installed before then though.
I suspect there's also a lot of increasingly power-hungry experiments that are going to be done as well - we're now (finally) ramping up to make both industrial lunar colonies
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You're overly optimistic. NASA's track record, even on ISS and its deployment has always been optimistic. There's one Russian module under development and 2030 in NASA years may as well be next year. The Russian module may be at risk since we're in a proxy war with our co-owners we're literally living out multiple movie plots of Divorced or Divorcing parents arguing over the kids. Getting back to the moon on the schedules agreed upon is now in jeopardy, I'm sure ISS retirement won't. It's already being us
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I don't remember the details offhand, but I don't believe it's a NASA project....
Hmm, okay, looks like I'm thinking of Axiom Space - a commercial space station project whose plan is to rent(?) ISS support while they assemble their initial station.
City Inspections (Score:1)
Deployable Composite Booms. (Score:3)
I admit I hadn't paid a whole lot of attention to iROSA until a month or two ago. "ISS is upgrading its solar arrays, okay, cool, whatever."
Then it suddenly hit me - "Wait, rollable solar panels are great and all - but how are they holding them in place?" I found a couple references to "like a tape measure" - but I've used tape measures, they're not going to cut it as a rigid beam, even in space.
So I dug into it and the answer is as clever as it is simple - the booms themselves are in fact also rolled up. The white stripes on the ends of the rolled up solar panels are in fact the booms that will support them, AND the power source that drives the deployment.
They're called Deployable Composite Booms, and the iROSA system sounds like it's their first real-world application. They work sort of like how a tape measure becomes rigid when unrolled, curving perpendicular to the rolling direction so that it can't roll back up, only far more extreme. Rather than a slightly curved strip of metal for stability, the iROSA booms are made from two half-circle carbon fiber "pipes", with edges that curve back outwards to lay almost flat - looking vaguely like an upper case letter omega from the end. Two such round half-pipes are then "taped" together along the flared edges, which come together to form a relatively sharp angle to form an round tube with two ridges running down the opposite sides. Since it curves out in both directions, and the curve is so extreme, it's not nearly as prone to kinking and collapsing the way a tape measure does when you're trying to make it support itself too far.
Rolling it up involves smashing them flat (using the "taped" seam as a hinge), and then rolling the now-flat "pipe" onto a spool.
Unrolling then just involves a brake that stops the resulting coiled spring from unwinding - relax the brake a bit, and the pipe slowly unrolls as it returns to it's original, unstressed shape.
And it sounds like iROSA is just the initial proof-of-concept application - they're looking at them to support easily deployable solar sails, and even structural girders. Whole pre-assembled and crossbraced towers could be folded down and rolled up. And you're not limited to straight beams either - the original half-pipes can be made to follow any curve, allowing for things like one-piece curved support beams for quansot-hut like structures on the moon.
More details: https://www.nasa.gov/directora... [nasa.gov]