Shown above: STS-126 spacewalker Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper rides the International Space Station's Canadarm2 to space shuttle Endeavour's payload bay. She is carrying a nitrogen tank assembly that was removed from the External Stowage Platform-3. The spacewalk is slightly ahead of schedule at this point.
The STS-126 mission to improve the International Space Station (ISS), already ahead of schedule, moves into a critical ISS repair phase this afternoon with a 6.5-hour spacewalk.
Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper and Steve Bowen are suiting up and will head outside at 1:45 p.m. EST. On the work list: a major effort to grease and repair a starboard rotary joint on the space station. The joint has suffered serious degradation, and no longer is able to perform auto-tracking in order to most efficiently use the station's solar arrays.
The vital work area is shown in the photo above. The intensive project also will include greasing the balky joint using a tool that looks like a caulking gun. The work is tedious, physicall demanding, and dangerous, and the spacewalking team has trained for hundreds of hours in the water training tank at Houston's Johnson Space Center.
Inside the station, STS-126 mission specialist Don Pettit and Expedition 18 flight engineer Sandra Magnus will operate the station's robotic arm. Mission specialist Shane Kimbrough will be the intravehicular officer, or spacewalk coordinator.
So far, the STS-126 mission aboard Endeavour, launched last Friday night from Kennedy Space Center, has gone extremely well. Earlier concerns about a potential missing strip of insulation on the shuttle have been resolved with a determination that ice covered the insulation shortly after launch. Mission managers are relaxing as analysis of two post-launch debris trails so far shows no serious danger to the shuttle's re-entry.
Astronaut Sandra Magnus has now officially replaced astronaut Gregory Chamitoff as part of the Expedition 18 crw on the space station. Chamitoff will head home with the STS-126 crew while Magnus stays behind for several months of work on the space station.
Unloading of materials for improvements on the space station, now entering its tenth year, have so far gone ahead of schedule.
UPDATE: You can now also watch the spacewalk live on Fox News.
Image credit: NASA TV.
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