ISS Power Restored Using Robotics—Latest Report

The International Space Station under NASA is one of the most famous space stations in the world, mainly because of the amount of work it does under this sector. Recently, the Main Bus Switching Unit failed but was promptly repaired using operations under robotics itself on 2^ndMay.

The work was done from the Mission Control Center of NASA which is present at Houston. Robotics have proven to be highly beneficial of late, especially for critical maintenance purposes which enables the astronauts to put in more hours for scientific experiments and develop technologies that will be further helpful to mankind. In fact, according to Mike Ferullo, the Robotics Operations Systems Officer, use of robotics is going to be instrumental in taking humans back to the surface of the moon by 2024. They are also developing two units called Canadarm2 and Dextre which will have direct application for the same.

The repairing of the MBSU is the second such incident where the work was completed without the need of a spacewalk. Mr. Mike revealed that the previous time they got a good idea about the configurations of the arms and how much force needs to work on it. Every time, the prior mission serves as a learning curve, he said.

The repairing work was all the more important because when the MBSU 3 failed on 29 April, the supply of power to the station fell by almost 25 percent. Immediately, jumpers were installed in order to ensure that the impact was as controlled as possible. Though the jumpers made sure that the space station kept functioning without hindrance, the main work was to replace the damaged unit as soon as possible, mainly because of the fact that the Dragon Cargo spacecraft by SpaceX needed to be caught, whose launch was already scheduled.