Live coverage: Spacewalk and tanking test

Two American astronauts will take on some spacewalking inspection work at the International Space Station early Tuesday and NASA will conduct a fuel-loading test at Kennedy Space Center's launch pad 39A.

You can watch both live here in The Flame Trench. We'll have live NASA TV coverage of the spacewalk beginning at 4:30 a.m. EST and live coverage of the tanking test beginning at 7 a.m. EST. Simply click the images above to launch our NASA TV viewers.

Outpost commander Peggy Whitson and flight engineer Dan Tani are slated to head outside the station at 6 a.m. but the excursion could begin earlier if spacewalk preparations run ahead of schedule. The two will inspect a foul-up rotary joint and a gimbal assembly on the starboard end of the station's central truss. Problems with both devices have forced NASA to temporarily lock them in place, significantly reducing the amount of electricity being generated at the outpost. It's unlikely NASA could launch a power-hungry Japanese laboratory as planned next April unless both can be fixed.

The detailed plan for the spacewalk is here: Revised_EVA_Procedures.pdf.

Back at Kennedy Space Center, engineers will begin fueling shuttle Atlantis' external tank around 7 a.m. EST in an effort to determine the root cause of the apparent failure of low-level fuel sensors. Pinpointing the cause is crucial to plans to launch Atlantis and the European Space Agency's Columbus science lab on Jan. 10. The test is expected to last 13 hours.