Astronauts Rescue Dextre: Mend Power Snag

Astronauts successfully restored power flow to the international space station's new robot Dextre on Friday night, overcoming a fault that had threatened to disrupt shuttle Endeavour's construction mission.

The astronauts used the space station's mechanical arm to grab onto Dextre and supply electricity to the machine's various joints and electronics. The robot had been lying inactive outside the orbiting complex for nearly two days.

The Mission Control’s announcement of "Good news from the flight control room, Dextre has power," came to the relief of everyone.

A fault in an electrical circuit had left the $209 million robot Dextre, without heaters to protect its systems from minus 200 degree F (-128.88C) temperatures of space.

Astronaut Julie Payette said on Friday, that Dextre has the ability to survive at least four or five days without power before its vital components freeze and stop working.

Engineers initially tried to solve the problem with a simple computer software patch which did not work, and they realized that there was a hardware problem.

Endeavour and its seven-man crew delivered Dextre — lying in pieces on its transport bed — to the space station. Dextre has a height of 3.7 metres and a width of 2.4 metres. It also has two multi-joined arms, with sensors on the wrists that give its hands a sense of touch.

The Canadian-built robot is designed to do regular tasks outside the station like replacing batteries and wires, and will reduce the number of dangerous spacewalks astronauts must perform.

The assembling of the robot began late Thursday by spacewalkers Richard Linnehan and Garrett Reisman on the first of five spacewalks scheduled during Endeavour's 16-day mission. With Friday night's successful power bypass, NASA kept on track Saturday night's spacewalk to hook the robot's 11-foot arms to its torso.

Dextre is expected to be assembled completely early next week, and then it will be removed from its transport bed. From that point on, it will be powered from its various attachment points directly on the space station.

Meanwhile, Commander Dom Gorie and Japanese astronaut Takao Doi removed a Japanese storage compartment from shuttle Endeavour's cargo bay using a robotic arm. The compartment is the first piece of Japan's new space station lab, Kibo. The $1 billion lab itself will fly to the space station in May, aboard shuttle Discovery.

The Endeavour crew reached the station on Wednesday for a construction and servicing call to the station. The shuttle blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday and is scheduled to land back on Earth on March 26.