ISS Crew Members Finish Second Spacewalk

Astronauts aboard the Discovery space shuttle and the International Space Station seem to have been on their toes ever since the craft docked at the station on Tuesday. On Saturday, the second spacewalk scheduled for the mission was completed successfully, just a day after the ISS' new set of solar wings had been successfully unfurled. The recent extra-vehicular activity (EVA) was not without incidents, as a loading platform at the end of the lab's “backbone” got stuck, and the delay forced other objectives of the walk to be postponed or removed from the mission plans altogether.

The two astronauts who performed the spacewalk managed to install a new Global Positioning System (GPS) antenna, took infra-red photos of two radiators, which concerned engineers back on Earth, and loosened the bolts on some battery compartments, so as to make the workload of the future ISS mission even smaller. However, Steven Swanson and Joseph Acaba ran into trouble when they tried to deploy the equipment storage platforms outside the ISS.

A single, protruding pin was the only thing responsible for the delay, as it was twisted 180 degrees off the position it should have been in. Despite the fact that it was very small, the pin held its ground, and wouldn't move despite the astronauts' best efforts. The Mission Control later ordered them to move on to the other tasks, so as to not waste valuable time. Already, all the tasks that were originally scheduled to be completed in four EVA sessions now have to be completed in three, due to the large delays that Discovery experienced on account of one of its damaged valves.

The task of the two spacewalkers was made even more difficult by the fact that their commanders, aboard the ISS and Discovery, as well as back home, kept changing the mission objectives even when they were already outside the station. This made for a very long walk, and a very tense one at that too. It took 6 and a half hours for Swanson and Acaba to complete everything they had been assigned with, in a mission that began at 12:51 pm EDT (1651 GMT).

The ISS “now looks like the artist renderings that we've been seeing for years. A day to celebrate!” the Mission Control said in a mail briefing that was sent to the space station on Saturday morning, before the spacewalk. “We sure appreciate the hard work you did for our beautiful space station. You guys proved that flexibility is definitely key,” Michael Fincke, who is the current commander on the orbital lab, praised the two.