ISS Gyro Fixed Via Spacewalk

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday July 1, 2004 @02:53PM from the better-late-than-never dept.

Teahouse writes "After a failed attempt last week, the ISS Astronauts finally got to fix the external gyroscope circut breaker in the station. Tests are being run today, but it looks like the ISS is back to having attitude stability with redundancy. This is particularly significant with the Shuttle being grounded for an extended period because the ISS would have had to use thruster fuel to keep the Station's solar panels pointed in the right direction without the gyroscopes, and no guarantee when more fuel would be arriving."

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Re:Attitude stability? by Xshare · 2004-07-01 15:01 · Score: 5, Informative

Attitude = The orientation of a spacecraft relative to its direction of motion.
Reasons for putting it outside by rosbif73 · 2004-07-01 20:00 · Score: 5, Informative

The reasons were explained recently by a NASA insider on sci.space.station:
To minimize the number of penetrations through the pressure hull (both the power source and the load are outside, in this case), minimize the number of connections through hatches (lesson learned from Mir), and minimize potential crew exposure to ammonia (used to cool external power components).