Astronauts aboard the international space station floated into their newest room on Wednesday — a $1 billion Nipponese scientific discipline compartment — and rejoiced over the fix of their broken Russian toilet.
Kibo, the biggest of the station's habitable modules, was transferred from the shuttlecock Discovery to the orbital outstation a twenty-four hours earlier. On Wednesday, the 10 American, Russian and Nipponese flyers aboard the two docked ballistic capsule connected electrical lines and computing machine cablegrams to the 37-foot-long lab. They activated warming and chilling systems and established a artificial satellite communication theory nexus with Japan's missionary post control at the Tsukuba Space Center, north of Tokyo.
"This is a great minute for the Japanese," spaceman Akihiko Hoshide said as he opened the presence door to the compartment and floated in for the first clip with a "Welcome" sign. The Nipponese began planning for Kibo 23 old age ago.
As he spoke, Hoshide hung a streamer outside the hatch, which announced in Nipponese "Open for Business."
His American and Russian co-workers floated behind their eager host, whirling and somersaulting in the module. Kibo, which intends "hope" in Japanese, is the biggest of the station's labs.
"It looks empty, but it's full of dreams," said Hoshide. Wednesday night, the spacemen began moving the first experimentations into the lab. The initial research will look into the behaviour of fluids and the cultivation of works and animate being cells in weightlessness.
Discovery docked with the station on Monday, delivering the laboratory as well as a new pump for the station's lone toilet.
Cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, a flight engineer, replaced the pump.
After disassembling and reassembling the piss aggregation pump in less than two hours, Kononenko claimed success in an exchange with Russia's missionary post control.
After respective diagnostic test flushes, a squad of technicians assembled in the control installation told the spacemen to restart full usage of the bathroom.
"The lavatory broke down two hebdomads ago, and the force aboard the station had to manually flush the Russian-built lavatory with other water. There was never a job with a separate solid waste material collector."
When two efforts failed to mend the lavatory with trim parts aboard the station, Soviet Union rushed a new pump to Jack Kennedy Space Center in clip for Discovery's launch on Saturday.
"Are you cats looking for a plumber?" Discovery commanding officer Mark Emmett Kelly joked when the station's three-man crew greeted the astronauts.
Discovery spacemen Microphone Fossum and Bokkos Garan will ship Wednesday on the 2nd of three spacewalks.
The chief undertaking is to set up Kibo for the improver of an external storage chamber. The spacemen will hoist the module, which was flown to the station in March, atop Kibo on Saturday.
