Nasa Gets View Of Future Remote-Controlled Robot Gives Nasa A New Way To Look At Space

The world on Wednesday got a view that only a select few have ever had before: What a spacewalker sees.

But in this case, the bird’s eye view was courtesy of a new basketball-shaped robot. The pictures came during a test of a remote-controlled camera called Sprint, which flew about the cargo bay of the space shuttle Columbia during a successful 5-hour spacewalk by astronauts Winston Scott and Takao Doi.

The $3 million Sprint provided a different perspective of Columbia than NASA usually gets with its fixed cameras in the cargo bay and on the robot arm.

As a free-floating rotating camera zipping above and around Columbia’s cargo bay, Sprint enabled ground controllers to get more of a feeling of being there.

“The camera views that we got from Sprint were awesome,” spacewalking officer Mike Hess said Wednesday in a Houston news conference. “They had some spectacular views and in places that we can’t usually take a … crew member.”

NASA’s acting spacewalk chief Greg Harbaugh added:

“Having this kind of floating eyeball” will become a crucial tool for NASA as it builds the international space station next summer.

From inside Columbia, pilot Steve Lindsey used a joystick and a laptop computer to control Sprint. The tests went so well that flight controllers told Lindsey to fly Sprint nearly twice as long as originally planned.

Sprint’s designers “hit a home run,” Lindsey said. “We’re real pleased. I think we got a real good piece of technology.”

Sprint was a bonus for NASA. The main reason for this spacewalk, which began at 4:09 a.m. EST, was to perform more tests on a 17.5-foot aluminum collapsible crane. The crane also will be a key tool on the space station.

When Scott and Doi tested the crane in an earlier spacewalk on Nov. 24, it didn’t connect and hold on to objects the way NASA wanted. And Scott and Doi didn’t have time to test the crane further because they had spent much of their spacewalk in an unplanned rescue of an errant solar satellite.

In Wednesday’s spacewalk, astronauts tried different methods of connecting the crane to objects. Those methods worked better than before, but were used only on smaller objects, Hess said.

It was the last spacewalking test before construction of the space station. With Wednesday’s test, NASA is “well positioned” to perform the more than 1,500 hours of spacewalks that will be needed over the next several years, Harbaugh said.

Today, Columbia’s crew will prepare to end its 15-1/2-day mission. The weather at Kennedy Space Center looks good for the scheduled 7:23 a.m. EST Friday landing, officials said.