Spacewalking astronauts upgrade station with new batteries
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Spacewalking astronauts hooked up fancy new batteries Friday on the International Space Station’s sprawling power grid.
NASA reported that all three lithium-ion batteries were up and running, a successful start to the space agency’s long-term effort to upgrade the aging solar power system.
Before venturing out, Commander Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson got a hand from a robot that took care of most of the grunt work — Dextre, a hulking machine with 11-foot arms.
Remotely operating Dextre outside the 250-mile-high lab, flight controllers in Houston spent the past week replacing decade-old, nickel-hydrogen batteries with the new ones. Handling all those batteries — each about half a refrigerator in size — was cumbersome and time-consuming.