(Newswire.net — September 4, 2013) South El Monte, CA —
Because of this, the work that Russian cosmonauts were doing on the International Space Station for a new module, which will be a laboratory, that’s due to be delivered in a few months is unexpectedly necessary.
Aleksandr Misurkin and Fyodor Yurchikhin used almost the complete seven-hour-plus spacewalk installing and routing Ethernet cable as well as 120 feet of power. Though it is not known the category of data cable used, cat 5 or cat 6. As any cabling person that works on terra firma knows, the cabling needs to be unreeled from spools and carefully secured to hooks or anchors, which is what these cosmonauts did.
“Running cat 5 or cat 6 cable, any low voltage data cable really, you do need to secure it once your cable run has been completed so as to not have the cable sag and pull at the insulation and copper strands inside. I can’t imagine that it would be any different in space!”, says Jose Rivera who has over 20 years of experience in low voltage cabling at King Televoice Inc, a Los Angeles based, telecommunications cabling and phone company.
The comment made from one of the Ethernet cable running cosmonauts was, “Today we are cable people.” as they were concluding their work.
Officially timed at seven hour and 29 minutes, this space walk took a full hour more than was planned for originally. This was because of work that was to continue on the following week. Which means that the work to be completed was advancing faster than expected.
Interestingly, these pair of Russians surpassed the previous record of seven hours and 16 minutes set at the Mir space station in 1990, making it the longest space walk by two Russians to date.
The mundane work of running power and Ethernet cable is still necessary even in the case of operating and maintaining a space station.
Read more: http://science.time.com/2013/08/16/2-russians-turn-cable-guys-in-record-spacewalk/#ixzz2dswNBN9V
Contact information: