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Spacewalking astronauts are doing a little maintenance work on the International Space Station's Canadian-built construction crane -- a 57-foot-long robotic arm that was delivered to the outpost on a shuttle mission in the spring of 2001.
Discovery mission specialist Ricky Arnold is armed with a grease gun loaded up with a special lubricant developed to work in temperatures that range from 250 degrees Fahrenheit to Minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit.
Arnold is applying the lubricant to three snares and six bearings within the latching end effector, or LEE, of the robotic arm.
Arnold began the work after he and spacewalking partner Joe Acaba finished tying down an experiment platform that the two were unable to fully deploy. They used safety tethers to strap the Unpressurized Cargo Carrier Attachment System platform to the P3 segment of the station's central truss.
The spacewalkers pushed, pulled and pried the platform, but had no joy in what was a second attempt to free the experiment pallet. Acaba and mission specialist Steve Swanson tried in vain to deploy the platform on a spacewalk Saturday.
Swanson, who is directing the spacewalk from inside the joined shuttle-station complex, told the astronauts that the platform appears to be securely strapped to the truss.
"Great job out there, guys," he said. "I know it didn't way we wanted it to, but you guys did a great job getting it in a safe configuration."
The astronauts will be wrapping up work soon and then will head back to the Quest airlock. The spacewalk is the 123rd to be performed in the assembly and maintenance of the station since the first two building blocks of the outpost were linked in low Earth orbit in late 1998.
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