Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams, along with her crew mate ISS commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, is out walking in space since morning and finished wrangling tough ammonia cooling lines outside the International Space Station as they shift them from a temporary arrangement to their permanent configuration.
Seema Hakhu Kachru
HOUSTON: Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams, along with her crew mate ISS commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, is out walking in space since morning and finished wrangling tough ammonia cooling lines outside the International Space Station as they shift them from a temporary arrangement to their permanent configuration.
The first of three spacewalks in nine days began on Wednesday at 9:14 am CST. The two spacewalkers are supposed to reroute the station's Loop A cooling system into its primary setup.
A second cooling loop -- Loop B -- will be rerouted during the February 4 spacewalk. After returning to Earth in July, Expedition 14 and Expedition 15 Flight Engineer Sunita Williams will hold the NASA astronaut record for longest time in space.
Sunita also will have completed the most spacewalks by a woman by the end of February. By the end of Expedition 14 in April, Lopez-Alegria should lead all astronauts in the number of spacewalks and the amount of time spent spacewalking.
Lopez-Alegria will have set that record just months earlier. During the spacewalk on Wednesday, NASA astronauts were running low on time and spacesuit battery power, so had to stop any extra tasks -- known as "get-aheads" -- at the end of first spacewalk outside the ISS.
The astronauts are stowing a pair of fluid lines that they stripped from an unneeded reservoir of spare ammonia coolant to complete the final major task of their spacewalk.
NASA flight controllers had hoped the astronauts would have enough time to photograph a starboard-reaching solar wing reaching out from the space station's Port 6 truss.
But the task will be added to a future spacewalk, possible as early as Sunday, in order to return images to be used to aid the solar array's retraction during NASA's planned STS-115 shuttle mission to the ISS in March.
Earlier in the walk, Expedition 14 astronauts had to keep a close eye for any hint of leaking ammonia coolant, a toxic material that could coat their spacesuits and prompt cleanup measures.
"It looks clean, I don't see anything coming out," Sunita, wearing an all-white suit, said as she and Lopez-Alegria plugged in one of the many ammonia fluid lines.
"That's good news," Chris Looper, a NASA space station trainer choreographing the Expedition 14 spacewalkers from Mission Control in Houston.
Lopez-Alegria and Sunita completed preparations for the spacewalk on Tuesday, checking out the tools they will use during the spacewalk and conducting a final review of procedures with specialists in Mission Control, Houston.
The pair "camped out" in the Quest airlock overnight to minimize preparation time in the morning. The reduced air pressure in the airlock protects against decompression sickness as spacewalkers go to the even lower pressure in the spacesuits for the spacewalk.
On Monday, Expedition 14 Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, assisted by Williams, swore in 16 sailors aboard the USS Dwight D Eisenhower during a special live link-up from the space station.
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