This story was updated at
7:21 a.m. EDT.
HOUSTON
— Two astronauts are set to venture outside the International
Space Station (ISS) later today to add camera eyes to the
orbiting lab's newest Japanese room.
Spacewalkers Mike Fossum
and Ron Garan will don their NASA-issue spacesuits and step into space at about
11:32 a.m. EDT (1532 GMT) to attach a pair of video cameras to the tip of the station's $1 billion Kibo laboratory.
"Mike and I are
getting ready to go out the door for our second spacewalk today," Garan said.
"It's going to be a wonderful day."
Commanded by veteran
spaceflyer Mark Kelly, Discovery's seven-astronaut crew attached the station's
37-foot (11 meter) Kibo laboratory on Tuesday and officially opened its roomy interior
a day later. Astronauts also fixed the space station's balky Russian toilet
yesterday as well.
NASA's Mission Control here
at the Johnson Space Center roused Discovery's STS-124 crew with the song
"I Want to Fly Away" by Lenny Kravitz, a tune chosen for Garan by his
wife Carmel and their three sons
"It's good to hear
that song this morning," Garan said, thanking his family.
The nearly 15-ton lab Kibo
lab module is the second segment of Japan's three-piece research facility to
reach space. Astronauts delivered an attic-like storage room
last March during an earlier shuttle flight, though the final piece - a
porch-like platform to hold exterior experiments - is not slated to launch
until next year.
But Fossum and Garan will
lay the groundwork for that exterior platform's arrival with the new cameras,
which will be used to survey the orbital porch's experiments and aid astronauts
when they wield Kibo's 33-foot (10-meter) main robotic arm. A second, smaller
robotic arm is slated for delivery to Kibo on a later shuttle flight.
"We're going to carry
those out of the airlock and out to the end of the Japanese lab," said
Fossum, lead spacewalker for the shuttle Discovery's STS-124 mission, in a NASA
interview. "There'll be several different purposes, but a big one is to
look at the experiments and payloads that have on their exposed facility that
will be bounced on [a] flight after ours out there."
During their planned
6.5-hour spacewalk, the second of three planned for Discovery's 14-day mission,
Fossum and Garan are expected to remove a set of locks and covers from Kibo's
robotic arm so astronauts can flex remotely from inside the new lab. They're
also slated to prepare the rooftop docking port of Kibo for the planned Friday
move of its storage module, which has sat patiently at a temporary berth on the
nearby Harmony connecting node since March for the main lab's arrival.
"I don't foresee any
problems working with the Japanese hardware," NASA's lead space
station flight director Annette Hasbrook said Wednesday. Much of the tasks are
similar to those performed during past module and laboratory deliveries, she
added.
In addition to preparing
Kibo's eyes and robotic arm for use in space, Fossum and Garan are expected to
prime work sites for a planned Sunday spacewalk to swap out an empty nitrogen
tank used to support the station's cooling system with a new one. They're also
due to retrieve a broken television camera from the station's metallic
backbone-like truss so astronauts can fix it inside the station and return it
during the third STS-124 spacewalk.
Thursday's spacewalk will
mark the fifth career excursion for Fossum, a veteran spaceflyer, and the
second for Garan, who is making his first spaceflight.
NASA is broadcasting the
planned launch of Discovery's STS-124 mission live on NASA TV on Saturday. Click here for SPACE.com's
shuttle mission updates and NASA TV feed.
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