Endeavour astronauts take first space walk

WASHINGTON–Two US astronauts on Friday embarked on the first space walk of the Endeavour shuttle’s final mission to the International Space Station, NASA said.

Drew Feustel and Greg Chamitoff, wearing spacesuits with solid and broken red stripes, respectively, floated out of the station at 0710 GMT to work on repairs and additions to the orbiting lab.

The pair installed an ammonia jumper cable that will connect the cooling loops of the two of the station’s segments, part of a larger effort to fix a leak in the photovoltaic thermal control system cooling loop.

They also installed two antennas for an external wireless communications system at the station’s Destiny laboratory.
The excursion ended at 9:29 am (1329 GMT) after six hours and 19 minutes, and will be followed by three more space walks over the course of the 16-day mission, the penultimate journey of the decades-old US shuttle program.
NASA said a total of 980 spacewalk hours and 12 minutes have now been spent building the orbiting space lab.

On Thursday, Endeavour’s astronauts installed a massive physics experiment, part of a 16-nation collaboration that aims to discover how the universe began.
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 is a $2-billion, 15,000-pound (7,000-kilogram) particle detector that will remain at the ISS to scour the universe for hints of dark matter and antimatter over the next decade.

It is expected to send data to scientists on Earth for the next 10 years.

NASA managers at mission control in Houston were meanwhile inspecting the shuttle’s heat shield after seven tiles appeared to have been damaged during its ascent, but officials have said there is no reason to be alarmed.

Endeavour blasted off on its final mission Monday with six astronauts on board — five Americans and one Italian — and docked at the ISS on Wednesday.
The Endeavour mission is being commanded by astronaut Mark Kelly, the husband of US Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who is recovering after being shot in the head at a January political meeting with local voters.

The shuttle will remain at the space station until May 30, returning to the United States on June 1.

The 30-year US space shuttle program formally ends later this year with the flight of Atlantis, leaving Russia’s space capsules as the sole option for world astronauts heading to and from the orbiting research lab.