SPACE WALKERS REMOVE EXPLOSIVE BOLT FROM RUSSIAN CRAFT

Cosmonauts successfully removed an explosive
bolt from a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on Thursday during a spacewalk.Space station commander Sergei Volkov and
flight engineer Oleg Kononenko dealt calmly with the hectic operation outside
the International Space Station (ISS) as first-time spacewalkers, despite early
troubles setting up a Strela hand-powered crane to reach the work site.The removal of the explosive bolt represents
part of a continuing Russian investigation into what caused the two previous Soyuz
missions to go offcourse and undergo ballistic reentries during their return to Earth.Ten of the pyro bolts typically fire to
separate the Soyuz instrument module from the return module. That allows the Soyuz
to point its heat shield downward to protect itself from the heat of reentry.However, a mysteriously delayed separation of
the modules forced the latest three-person Soyuz crew to endure a steep
ballistic reentry and gravitational forces reaching up to 10 times those on
Earth. South Korea’s first spaceflight participant, So-yeon Yi, detailed the experience as “scary” and was afterward for neck and back pain.briefly hospitalizedRussian engineers want to check the pyro
bolts for signs of environmental damage from electromagnetic or plasma forces
around the space station and Soyuz spacecraft. NASA officials are also
interested in the results of the investigation, because the Soyuz will provide
the only access to the space station for a time after the space shuttle retires.