Word: solarization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...With the embattled space station's life support running on reserve power, first on that list will be the gyroscopic systems which keep Mir's solar panels correctly aligned with the sun ? and its batteries charging. And with tests on the newly-repaired computer draining power rapidly, Michael Foale and the two cosmonauts aboard are anxious to get those gyrodines clicking and whirring again. When full alignment is restored, the Russian arrivals can get to what they came to do: get out to the Spektr and reconnect the power lines that could make the Mir almost whole again. That spacewalk...
...Their first tasks are to boost the station's electric power and reopen Mir's damaged Spektr module, site of U.S. astronaut Michael Foale's experiments. Ever since an errant Progress supply capsule slammed into it in June, Spektr has been completely sealed off and the cables to its solar panels severed, cutting Mir's electric power in half...
After they install a new hatch that was flown to Mir last month, Solovyev will squeeze into Spektr to look for the cables from its solar panels so they can be reconnected to the Mir power system. But it will be a hunt in the dark, with the only light coming from a miner's type lamp on Solovyev's helmet and a flashlight held by Vinogradov in the airlock behind...
MOSCOW: Mir is adrift once more after a failure of the space station's main computer. The systems shut-down occurred while a cargo ship was docking. Now the troubled space station's solar panels are no longer pointed at the sun, leaving its rickety body wobbling and unoriented and its crew in the dark...
Without Spektr's solar panels, the space station has been limping along at half power--a situation that, if unremedied, would make it impossible to keep Mir operating as a research station. Rather than abandon Mir, the Russians worked out a way the crew could fix it: Tsibliyev and fellow cosmonaut Alexander Lazutkin would put on space suits and take an "internal eva"--an indoor space walk--to reattach the cables. The power lines would then be passed through a replacement hatch that was sent up aboard a supply rocket earlier this month...