Follow US Investment Immigration and US News: On December 24, two United States astronauts conducted a spacewalk on Christmas Eve, successfully repairing the malfunctioning cooling system on the International Space Station.
This was the second spacewalk in four days for U.S. astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Michael Hopkins, and only the second Christmas Eve spacewalk in the history of the International Space Station.
The astronauts took this action to repair a malfunctioning cooling system line on the International Space Station. The line stopped working on the 11th of this month, forcing astronauts to shut down all non-essential equipment and suspend some scientific experiments in the laboratory.
According to NASA, as the cooling system has been successfully repaired, all equipment will return to normal operation by this weekend.
As the astronauts were about to complete their seven-and-a-half-hour spacewalk, the ground control center radioed to them: “This is the best Christmas ever.”
Hopkins replied: “Merry Christmas, everyone. It took a few weeks, but we finally got it done.”
Last Saturday, the two astronauts had already removed the failed pump module. The spacewalk on Tuesday the 24th was to install the new pump module.
The previous Christmas Eve spacewalk occurred in 1999 during the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope.
