By Xinhua,
Washington : The U.S. space shuttle Discovery’s crew and residents on the International Space Station opened the newly installed Japanese Kibo science module and solved the pressing toilet issue on Wednesday.
At 5:09 p.m. EDT (2109 GMT), Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide entered the bus-sized module for the first time, followed by his fellow space shuttle and space station crew members.
Hoshide floated toward a television camera with a sign that said “welcome” in English and Japanese.
Just before the grand opening, Hoshide said, “This is a great moment for the Japanese. It has been 20-plus years to get this module up in space.”
For now, the huge module is empty, “but it is filled with dreams,” said Hoshide. Almost 11.2 meters long and 4.4 meters wide, Kibo’s science module is now the biggest of the nine rooms at the orbital outpost.
Japanese engineers are watching over the new module from the country’s Tsukuba Space Center to the north of Tokyo.
Early on Wednesday, space station astronauts successfully replaced the gas liquid separator pump in the station’s toilet system. After a testing process, they were very happy to see that the toilet started working properly again.
The station toilet acted up recently. It can work for solid waste disposal but requires additional steps for liquid waste, taking two crew members and 10 minutes of maintenance after three flushes.
The new pump was rushed in from Russia to the United States to be squeezed in the jammed payload bay of shuttle Discovery.
Discovery lifted off on Saturday, and this is the second of three shuttle flights launching components to complete Kibo. In March, Kibo’s storage module was delivered to the station.
Later this week, spacewalkers will relocate the storage room, attaching it to the new science module, which was installed during Monday’s first spacewalk.