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Sunita, Lopez wrap up fourth spacewalk
Sunita Williams and US spacewalking record-holder Michael Lopez-Alegria have wound up a six-hour, 40-minute spacewalk.
Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams and US spacewalking record-holder Michael Lopez-Alegria have wound up a six-hour, 40-minute spacewalk, the last in an unprecedented series of three spacewalks in nine days from the quest airlock.
While, astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria broke the US record of most time walking in space, he needs more than 24 hours to beat the all-time record (82 hours) of Russian Anatoly Solovyov.
The spacewalk ended at 2:06 pm CST on Thursday (01:36 IST on Friday).
Sunita, in her all white space suit and lopez-alegria donning red striped suit, accomplished all their primary tasks of maintenance work outside the international space station, successfully.
The major tasks scheduled for Thursday spacewalk included: the removal and disposal of several unneeded thermal shrouds, the deployment of an ISS cargo carrier attachment point, losing several launch locks on the station's portside truss, and the successful installation of a set of cables to transfer power from the ISS to visiting space shuttles.
In addition to the mentioned tasks they were also able to perform an extra photo survey of the station's shuttle docking port, known as the Pressurized Mating Adapter-2.
It was the last in an unprecedented series of three spacewalks in nine days from the quest airlock.
The three spacewalks, termed EVAs 6, 7, and 8 because there were five previous station spacewalks from the US airlock quest during increments, times when no shuttle was present, began on Thursday at 7:27 CST (18:57 IST).
