Discovery spacewalkers Danny Olivas and Christer Fuglesang have switched their spacesuits to internal battery power and are ready to step outside the Quest airlock to begin another day of work on the International Space Station. They'll tackle an assortment of jobs during a planned six-and-a-half hour excursion that will equip the station to store more spare parts, prepare for the addition of a final large American module and repair a unit that helps gyroscopes point the station properly.
The spacewalk officially began at 4:39 p.m. EDT, 10 minutes ahead of schedule. This is the third and last spacewalk planned during shuttle Discovery's 13-day mission, the fifth ever for Olivas and Fuglesang. It is the 133rd dedicated to building and servicing the space station, and the 14th toward that effort this year.
Olivas is wearing a a spacesuit with solid red stripes on the legs and responding to the call sign "EV-1." His helmet camera will show No. 18 in the bottom right corner. Fuglesang is wearing a suit without stripes and responding to "EV-2." His helmet camera will show No. 16 in the bottom right corner.
Mission specialist Pat Forrester will once again be choreographing the spacewalk from Discovery's aft flight deck.
You can watch the entire spacewalk and other mission activity live here - just click on the NASA TV still image on the right of this page to launch a viewer.
The spacewalkers' first task will be to deploy a mechanism on which large carriers holding spare parts will be stowed.
The next shuttle mission, labeled STS-129 and targeted for launch in November, will deliver two of those large carriers.
One is to be placed on the Starboard 3 segment of the station's football field-length central truss, or backbone, and the other on the Port 3 truss.
Deployment of the so-called Payload Attachment System, or PAS, on the starboard segment had been planned during Endeavour's STS-127 mission in July but couldn't be completed.
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