Love carries exposure experiment facility.
Walheim and Love
Spacewalkers catching up
After attaching a gyroscope in Atlantis' payload bay, spacewalkers Stan Love and Rex Walheim will soon begin removing EuTEF (European Technology Exposure Facility) for relocation to a rack on the Columbus module.
Making up a nearly half-hour deficit from the spacewalk timeline, Rex Walheim and Stan Love are now about 15 minutes ahead of schedule.
Love carried the gyroscope to the bay while riding the Canada Arm II from a storage platform on a truss.
The 1,200-pound gyroscope failed in October 2006 and was replaced. It will be returned to Earth, refurbished and saved for a spare. Four working gyroscopes keep the space station in the correct orientation.
Love's glove was slightly damaged, but he was given permission to continue working.
The spacewalk officially began when the pair switched their spacesuits to battery power at 8:07 a.m. EST. Walheim's helmet camera is No. 18, while his spacesuit has an unbroken line. Love's camera is No. 16, while his spacesuit has a broken line.
On the mission's third spacewalk, Love will function like a human forklift, holding three massive - but weightless - pieces of equipment while he is attached to the space station robot arm. On separate swings of the arm, he will move two European experiment modules and a gyroscope.
If the 6.5-hour spacewalk runs ahead of schedule, Walheim and Love will have several additional tasks: inspecting the starboard solar alpha rotary joint and inspecting damage to a handrail that might be causing glove damage.
Atlantis is scheduled to land at 9:06 a.m. Wednesday at Kennedy Space Center, shortly before the Navy shoots down a low-orbiting, non-functioning spy satellite that carries a toxic half-ton of hydrazine rocket fuel.
Click for interactive graphic on Columbus installation.
Click for flight day 9 execute package.
Click for STS-122 fact sheet.
Click for NASA-TV schedule, which details mission events.
The SOLAR and EuTEF modules sit on a rack in the shuttle's payload bay.
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