Occurred On 43rd Anniversary Of First US Excursion

Tuesday was the 43rd anniversary of the first spacewalk by an American, performed by Ed White during the Gemini IV mission. The crews of the space shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station celebrated with a six-hour, 48-minute spacewalk to prepare Japan's new Kibo research lab for installation on the station.

Veteran spacewalker Michael Fossum and his rookie partner, Ronald Garan, got started about an hour late, at 1230 EDT, due to problems with communications equipment. Among their tasks was retrieval of a 50-foot boom to be used in a detailed look for damage on Discovery's exterior before attempting reentry.

Normally, that inspection boom is carried on each shuttle mission, but the Kibo lab section being delivered on this mission is so big, there was no room. Anticipating the issue, the last shuttle crew left theirs stowed along the outside of the space station. Discovery will have plenty of room on the way home to bring it back.

After Fossum and Garan prepared the station's Harmony module for docking with Kibo's huge pressurized module, astronauts Akihiko Hoshide and Karen Nyberg, working from inside the station, used the station's robot arm to draw the module into position, and docking was completed just after 1900 eastern.

Garan also replaced a trundle bearing on the station's starboard solar array. Debris was discovered in the array's rotary joint last year, and the temporary fix was to stop turning the array to track the sun. The resulting reduction in efficiency will leave the station short on its power budget when the Kibo module is ready for operation, so permanent repairs will need to be made.

Tuesday's spacewalk was the 195th for US astronauts, continuing the tradition started by Ed White on June 3, 1965.

FMI: www.nasa.gov