ENDEAVOUR—Problems with “Gigantor”

March 14, 2008—Spacewalkers Rick Linnehan and Garrett Reisman finished the first spacewalk of Endeavour’s mission to the International Space Station. Job one was installing the KIBO lab. Job two, was revisiting a vision from Linnehan’s childhood.

I sometimes tell people how I grew up during the time of the 1960’s TV series “Batman”. Often, I’m lucky to get a blank stare in response, or something like “Oh yeah…Adam West…isn’t he the Mayor on ‘Family Guy’?  Well, Astronaut Rick Linnehan has me beaten by a few years. He sat in front of his TV watching Japanese imports like “Gigantor: The Space Age Robot”. His first response to seeing the new Canadian built robot arm for the space station is that it resembled Gigantor. 

The “Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator” goes by the more familiar name of Dextre. It doesn’t look all that Gigantor-like in the photo of a scale model at Kennedy Space Center, but it does appear somewhat human with big arms, a head, and a torso. A two-ton Swiss army knife might be another good analogy. However, its smooth transition from Shuttle payload to new part on the Station hit a snag. It appears that engineers picked the wrong cable to transmit both power and data to and from the new arm while it sits inside Endeavour’s cargo bay. That means heaters to keep the arm warm in the frigid temperatures of space aren’t working. The situation could be solved as of tonight, although questions on picking power cables in the future may go on for a while.

On a separate note, many thanks for all the kind responses to my feature on NPR’s All Things Considered Saturday about going up a Zero-G weightlessness training flight. Here’s the link in case you’d like to take another spin…

 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87829750 

On the publishing front, if you happen to be in the Boston area on April 12^th, I’ll be giving a talk at Harvard about “Final Countdown”. It’s the keynote at a fundraiser for the Mount Washington Observatory. If you like, click here for more info… 

http://www.mountwashington.org/events/boston/

More to come...

Photos courtesy of NASA