Fossum and Garan got a head start on that work Thursday. One last spacewalk is planned for Sunday, to replace an empty nitrogen-gas tank at the space station. HAUNTED SPACE LAB TVThe two TV cameras that were set up on the lab's exterior Thursday will be instrumental in those robot-arm operations. And on Saturday, they will test drive Kibo's 33-foot robot arm. On Friday, the astronauts will attach a storage shed to Kibo that was dropped off by another shuttle crew in March. There are now three labs at the orbiting complex, supplied by NASA, the European Space Agency and, now, the Japanese Space Agency. Space shuttle Discovery's astronauts delivered and installed Kibo earlier in the week. Skylab was NASA's first space station, back in the 1970s. "We have not seen that much space in space since Skylab," Mission Control told the astronauts in a written message. "They got tired of your banging on the roof," Ham answered.Įven with all the racks moving in, Kibo was still noticeably bigger than the eight other rooms at the space station. I don't see anybody," one of the spacewalkers said. "Lots of people at work in there," astronaut Kenneth Ham informed the spacewalkers. He and Garan removed thermal covers from the lab's robot arm and added them to a variety of attachment points.Īs the spacewalkers toiled outside, their eight colleagues hauled more experiment racks into the billion-dollar lab, called Kibo, Japanese for hope, and flight controllers near Tokyo monitored the power systems. "I feel like I'm on a camping trip trying to pack up a wet tent on a Sunday morning," Fossum said as he wrestled with some of the lab's insulation. It was their second spacewalk in three days at the shuttle-station complex, orbiting 210 miles above Earth. looked like puffy dolls against the 37-foot-long, 14-foot-wide lab, which is now the biggest room at the international space station. Spacewalking astronauts worked on the outside of Japan's shiny new science lab Thursday, installing cameras and removing covers.ĭressed head to toe in white, Michael Fossum and Ronald Garan Jr.
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