Tag : Spacewalks

Washington: After finding water in an astronaut's helmet, NASA has suspended all, except the most urgent spacewalks, the agency officials have announced. Water was found in the helmet worn by European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Matthias Maurer following a March 23 spacewalk, Space.com reported. Maurer reported about 20 to 25 centimetres of water in a very thin layer, covering the helmet's inner surface. Although the suit sometimes does generate a bit of water, but "this was a bit beyond what our normal experience faces. It was specifically the quantity of water that got our attention," Dana Weigel, deputy station programme manager at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston, said during a press conference this week. The agency officials said they will perform an assessment of its extravehicular mobility unit (EMU) spacesuits, which will return to Earth in July. It means the astronauts will not be able to go outside and perform extravehicular activities (EVAs) for several months unless there is a pressing need for repairs on the International Space Station, the report said. "Until we understand better what the causal factors might have been during the last EVA with our EMU, we are no-go for nominal EVA," Weigel said. Meanwhile, the recent SpaceX's Crew-4 mission and Boeing's uncrewed Orbital Flight Test-2 have carried More helmet absorption pads to the orbiting lab. These may help in case the astronauts need to repair something in space before the investigation concludes, Weigel said. "We have supplemental ... very thin kind of absorptive pads that we can put on the inside of the helmet," Weigel said. "One of them is towards the back of the crew headset, and the other one is kind of a band that goes up over the head. [It's] kind ...