NASA works to make room for solar wings

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- In fits and starts, NASA began retracting via remote control a 115-foot solar array on the international space station Wednesday, likening the tricky task to folding a road map back up and stuffing it in the glove compartment. The electricity-generating solar array served as a temporary power source aboard the orbiting outpost. NASA needed to move it out of the way so that a new, permanent pair of solar wings could rotate in the direction of the sun. The folding began shortly before 12:30 p.m. and was expected to take about five hours. The work was tedious and difficult, both for the flight controllers on the ground and the astronauts at the space station. They were repeatedly forced to unfold large sections of the golden array they had just retracted in order to smooth out creases in the panels and counter slackness in the wire tension.

Astronaut Sunita "Suni" Williams reported that the technique worked the first time a crease appeared.

"That's good news. You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue here," Mission Control radioed back, echoing words said by a flight controller after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969.

Because it had been six years since the array was last folded up, flight controllers and astronauts were not sure how easy it would be.

"It's kind of like folding a map up," space shuttle Discovery commander Mark Polansky radioed Mission Control after the crease appeared. "You start folding it and the folding goes the wrong way. ... There's nothing you can do to it other than pop it back in place or unfold it and try again."

The astronauts and flight controllers succeeded in retracting the array more than the 40 percent needed to provide enough clearance for the rotation of a pair of giant solar wings that were delivered by the space shuttle Atlantis in September. However, the array got stuck again when it was about 60 percent folded up. The old array will be moved to another spot during a later shuttle mission.

The space agency hoped to fit the old array into a 21-inch-high box. If it didn't fold up properly, NASA had the option of using spacewalkers to manually retract it during two remaining spacewalks.

During two spacewalks on Thursday and Saturday, astronauts will rewire connectors from the old solar array to the new solar wings. Reconfiguring the power system will enable the station to provide electricity to laboratories that will be added to the structure over the next few years.

NASA had the shuttle astronauts and space station crew members sleep in highly protected areas of the two spacecraft Tuesday night as a precaution against radiation from a solar flare eruption. Such measures are taken from time to time in space.

---

Associated Press writer Rasha Madkour in Houston contributed to this report.

---

On the Net:

http://www.spaceflight.nasa.gov