By ANTARA News
Washington : Two astronauts from the US shuttle Endeavour stepped into space Thursday in the first of a series of spacewalks to install Japan’s maiden laboratory at the International Space Station (ISS), NASA television showed.
Mission Specialist and lead spacewalker Rick Linnehan and Flight Engineer Garrett Reisman emerged at 8:18 pm Central Daylight Time (0118 GMT Friday), according to NASA, to begin the task of maneuvering phase one of the laboratory out of Endeavour’s payload bay and attaching it to the orbiting station.
With the installation of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Kibo laboratory, a micro-gravity research facility, Japan gains a foothold on the ISS alongside the United States, Russia and Europe, whose laboratory Columbus was delivered to the station in February.
During the walk expected to last six and a half hours, the pair also were to begin assembling a piece of Canadian hardware, a new component for the robotic arm named Dextre.
Linnehan and Reisman spent the night before the walk in a decompression chamber to purge nitrogen from their bodies, NASA was quoted by AFP as saying.