Astronauts aboard the International
Space Station are gearing up for an extra spacewalk on Tuesday to wrap up some
unfinished business outside the orbiting laboratory.
Space station commander Michael
Fincke of NASA and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov will don their Orlan
spacesuits and step outside the space station to install a stubborn European-Russian
experiment and finish some other orbital chores left over from their mission's first
spacewalk in December.
The spacewalk is scheduled to begin
at 12:20 EDT (1620 GMT) and last just over five hours. It comes just one day
before NASA's planned launch of the space shuttle Discovery toward the station
on Wednesday night. Discovery is due to dock at the orbiting laboratory on
Friday to deliver
a new station segment, U.S. solar arrays and swap out one space station crewmember.
"We're looking forward to the big
day tomorrow," Fincke radioed down to Mission Control in Houston on Monday.
Chief among the tasks for Fincke
and Lonchakov is the installation of EXPOSE-R, a collection of nine
separate materials exposure experiments assembled by Russia's Federal Space
Agency and the European Space Agency. The experiment suite will expose seeds,
spores and other samples to the space environment for about 18 months before
being retrieved for the return trip home.
Lonchakov, who celebrated his 44th
birthday aboard the station last week, has been preparing the
EXPOSE-R experiment for the spacewalk.
Fincke and Lonchakov attempted to
attach the experiment platform to the hull of the station's Russian segment in
late December, but a connector failed to transmit telemetry back to mission
control on Earth. Stymied, the spacewalkers hauled EXPOSE-R back inside the
station for repairs.
"They determined that it had been
improperly configured," NASA spokesperson Kelly Humphries of the Johnson Space
Center told SPACE.com on Monday. "So they've got it configured properly
now and they're going to go out and install it. They're expecting it to work."
In addition to EXPOSE-R's
installation, Fincke and Lonchakov have a list of other chores to perform
outside the station's Russian segment. The astronauts are planning to remove
some unneeded straps from equipment, relocate a micrometeoroid impact
experiment, reinstall insulation on the station's Zvezda module and
conduct a photographic survey of the outpost's Russian segment, NASA
officials said.
While Fincke and Lonchakov toil
outside the space station, their crewmate Sandra Magnus of NASA will remain
inside the orbiting laboratory.
Magnus is preparing to return to
Earth later this month aboard the space shuttle Discovery. Her replacement,
Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, is due to arrive aboard Discovery and stay
aboard until June. Wakata, a veteran spaceflyer for the Japan Aerospace
Exploration Agency, is Japan's first long-duration astronaut.
SPACE.com will provide live coverage of Tuesday's
spacewalk and a link to live NASA video from the International Space Station
beginning at 12:00 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT).
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