ISS Crew Performs EVA

The crew of the main expedition ISS-3 on the International Space Station
(ISS) have performed an EVA.

The objective of the EVA was to recover from an Off-Nominal Situation
(ONS) which occurred during docking of Progress M1-7 logistics vehicle
at the final phase of mating the active Docking Assembly (DA) with the
passive docking assembly on Service Module Zvezda.

This situation prevented successful completion of nominal docking timeline
on November 29, 2001.

A preliminary ONS analysis, which included viewing video records of
Progress M-45 undocking from ISS, and Progress M1-7 docking, showed
that there was a flexible curved foreign object on the docking plane
of the Zvezda module docking assembly.

During the EVA performed from the Russian docking comparment, Pirs module,
cosmonauts M.Turin (flight engineer, cosmonaut tester of RSC Energia)
and V.Dezhurov (pilot, commander of Soyuz TM) removed this object which
turned out to be a sealing rubber ring from the active docking assembly
of Progress M-45, which had remained on the Zvezda module DA ever since
they undocked on November 22, 2001. ISS-3 crew commander Frank Culbertson
stayed inside the space station and monitored the extravehicular activities
from within.

During EVA operations, on commands from the ground the logistics vehicle
was moved along the docking probe of its DA relative SM, and eventually
the probe was retracted to finally mate the logistics vehicle with the
space station.

As a result of the EVA operation, the vehicle docking with ISS was finally
completed.

In the course of the activities, and during the transit of the cosmonauts
between Pirs module and the docking area, they took photographs, including
those that support the work under the program of space research and
experiments conducted on ISS.

The difficult and labor-intensive work of removing the sealing ring
was successfully completed owing to well coordinated activities of cosmonauts
and specialists from the Lead Operations Control Team (LOCT).

The operation lasted 2.5 hours. The EVA hatch on the Pirs module was
opened at 16:20:15 Moscow time, and it was closed at 19:05:45.

This was the fifth EVA performed by ISS crew.

It is planned to return the recovered sealing ring to Earth for study
in order to establish the causes of the situation, which occurred for
the first time in 30 years of operation of this DA design.

Upon completion of the EVA, the seal of the interface was checked, and
on-board systems of the station were reset to their initial condition.

Based on reports from the crew and LOCT that controlled and monitored
the space station mission from the Mission Control Center near Moscow
(MCC-M), the crew feels well and the status of the ISS on-board systems
is within design limits.

During EVA operations of the ISS-3 crew, among those present at the
MCC-M were the Technical Director of Russia’s manned space program,
General Designer of RSC Energia, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Yu.P.Semenov, , RSC Energia specialists, representatives of Rosaviakosmos
and other organizations in the industry.