The cosmic ray detector is working now thanks to the team of ISS astronauts who took a spacewalk and have operated outside the International Region Space on Saturday. The cosmic ray detector is called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer receives unique coolant pumps at this fourth walk of the astronauts.
The two spacewalking astronauts are from NASA, Andrew Morgan, and from Italy, Luca Parmitano. After installing the pumps, they have looked for other leaks in the plumbing as well.
The Alpha Spectrometer has a lot of expensive pieces, around $2billions. The spectrometer’s purpose is to hunt and find dark matter and other antimatter. What is interesting about this object and the task done by astronauts is the idea that the spectrometer wasn’t done for spacewalking astronauts.
NASA is saying that the Alpha spectrometer is more complicated than the Hubble Telescope Region. It took NASA a lot of years to create a way of sending the astronauts to deal with it.
ISS Astronauts Took A Spacewalk To Fix The Cosmic Ray Detector
The other three spacewalks of the astronauts have gone according to plan, even if NASA feared of the compound object.
What Morgan and Parmitano have done, was to cut into the metallic pipes, then degraded the coolant pumps, and finally to spliced the tubes into another four pumps. These two astronauts are having all the admiration of working with those big gloves and those conditions.
The spectrometer has around 6.800 kilograms and is launched by NASA for studying cosmic rays. Until now, NASA has seen with the spectrometers help approximately 148 billion cosmic rays.
Year by year, the ISS spectrometer is shutting down gradually at the final of the year, to restore the damaged pieces. Being a complex task, the repairs would take a long time, sometimes around five to ten years. The idea is to make the spectrometer work for a lifetime and not to work for three years initially.
