A spacewalking astronaut sent some surplus gear tumbling away from the International Space Station today after an orbital version of wind-up-and-pitch.
Anchored on the end of the station's robot arm and clad in a cumbersome spacesuit, flight engineer Clay Anderson grasped a boxy metal frame about the size of a small kitchen table. He leaned back, rocked forward and then gave the 212-pound frame a hard push.
"Good jettison," fellow spacewalker Fyodor Yurchikhin said as the frame slowly spun end-over-end about one every five seconds. Tossed overboard from a point below and behind the station, the frame tumbled off into low Earth orbit and ultimately will burn up during atmospheric rentry.
"It can still see it. It's pretty cool," Anderson told colleagues in NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston. "Now it looks like a huge star."
Ground controllers were impressed.
"It looked like a fantastic throw from here," NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy said.
"Thanks. Glad to be of service," Anderson replied. "I'll be sending my bill in the mail. Trash disposal."
The frame served as a mounting platform for a video stanchion that was put in place on the station's central truss earlier in the spacewalk.
Coming up next: Anderson will jettison a 1,400-pound coolant tank the size of a refrigerator.
IMAGE NOTE: Click to enlarge the NASA TV screen grab from The Associated Press. It shows astronaut Clay Anderson on the end of the International Space Station's robot arm as he prepared to jettison a video stanchion frame.
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