WASHINGTON, July 23 (RIA Novosti) – NASA said Tuesday that it has appointed an investigative board to look into last week’s spacewalk that was aborted when water leaked into the helmet and spacesuit of an Italian astronaut outside the International Space Station (ISS).
The NASA panel will “develop a set of lessons learned from the incident and suggest ways to prevent a similar problem in the future,” the US space agency said in a statement.
The board will begin its probe Aug. 2 and work in coordination with a NASA engineering team already examining the spacesuit and life-support equipment used by European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano when the water leaked into his helmet, drenching his nose and mouth.
NASA said its engineering team is trying to fix the spacesuit and life-support equipment in order to allow spacewalks to continue.
The five-member panel will be led by Chris Hansen, the ISS’ chief engineer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
NASA is also hurrying to get spare spacesuit parts aboard a Russian cargo ship carrying supplies to the ISS that is set to launch from Kazakhstan on Saturday, The Associated Press reported Monday.
Parmitano and US flight engineer Chris Cassidy were conducting last week’s spacewalk to prepare for the arrival of a new Russian lab by replacing, relocating and reconfiguring video and electronic equipment aboard the ISS.
The planned six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk was abruptly halted after only 90 minutes, even though “the water was not an immediate health hazard” for the astronaut, NASA said.
None of the tasks that Cassidy and Parmitano were scheduled to do during the spacewalk were urgent or vital to the safety of the crew on board the ISS, NASA said last week.
