CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A pair of spacewalking astronauts finished most of their assigned tasks during a nearly seven-hour excursion Wednesday at the International Space Station (ISS).
Expedition Six commander Ken Bowersox and science officer Don Pettit -- both first-time spacewalkers -- worked outside as Soyuz commander Nikolai Budarin watched from the interior.
"I hope I don't wake up and find out this is a dream," Pettit said from within the Quest airlock shortly before beginning the six-hour, 51-minute spacewalk -- the ISS program's 50th extravehicular activity (EVA).
Pettit originally was assigned as a back up astronaut for the Expedition Six crew, but a medical certification issue with another crewmember put Pettit in space instead. Later, a concern about Budarin's fitness for a spacewalk prompted NASA flight surgeons to give Pettit the nod.
Some minor trouble delayed the start of the spacewalk about 20 minutes when the astronauts had trouble opening the outer hatch of the U.S. Quest airlock.
As the tension mounted and more and more people could be seen gathering around the computer consoles in Mission Control, the crew shook and jiggled the hatch as they turned the knob and were able to free it.
Later in the EVA an inspection of the hatch area revealed that small fabric loops on a thermal blanket that protects the doorway had somehow caught on the hatch handle, preventing it from fully moving.
"Wow, what are the odds of that?" Bowersox said after the spacewalk concluded.
"Well, it happened to us because we were able to figure it out," Pettit said.
"Well, I didnt want to make a big deal out of it, but I am wearing (spacesuit no.) 3013, I think," Bowersox said, referring to the unlucky number.
Just before the crew ended their spacewalk they took a pair of scissors and carefully cut away the loops so the problem wouldn't reoccur.
The only other trouble for the spacewalkers came when they tried to remove a light stand and fixture from a holding tray on the S-1 truss segment. The light was supposed to be installed on a moving work platform.
However, a metal pin apparently prevented the stand from rotating out of its holder. Solving the problem would have taken too much time so the spacewalkers were told to move on to other tasks.
"This is considered a very low priority for today's spacewalk and will have no impact on future station assembly operations in the near term. This work will be deferred to a future expedition spacewalk," said mission commentator Rob Navias.
Work completed included:
- Removing ten launch locks on a heat-dispelling radiator panel located on the P-1 truss segment that was installed at the station last November.
- Extending the 75-foot panel upon a command from Mission Control in Houston while the spacewalkers watched from a safe distance.
- Cleaning some kind of gritty residue from a docking port on the Unity module that is used by supply modules that are periodically hauled up into orbit by the shuttle.
- Checking the status of an ammonia cooling system by taking a measurement of a certain line's pressure.
- Moving tools from a storage box into the Quest airlock.
With the completion of this 50th spacewalk at the orbiting outpost, station construction workers have logged 312 hours and 11 minutes performing assembly and maintenance operations.
The next set of spacewalks at the ISS is planned for a targeted March shuttle mission in which the Expedition Six crew will be returned home and replaced by the Expedition Seven crew.
Three spacewalks are planned for that shuttle flight, including one to replace a broken gyroscope on the station that is used to help keep the laboratory complex oriented in the proper direction.
The station has four such devices is safely operating with the three good gyroscopes.
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