Spacewalkers have bolted an old ammonia tank to a carrier in shuttle Discovery's payload bay for a trip back to Earth next week. That completed a job that took nearly two spacewalks to complete - removing the old tank from outside the International Space Station, installing a new one and securing the old tank in Discovery.
Mission specialists Danny Olivas and Christer Fuglesang installed the new tank and stowed the old one in just over five hours, with another hour or so still alloted for their spacewalk, the mission's second of three.
They'll now move on to a series of "get-ahead" tasks that managers hoped to accomplish if time allowed.
One of the big ones is placing two covers over cameras at the end of the station's robotic arm before the arrival of the unmanned Japanese HTV cargo carrier on Sept. 16in its maiden flight.
The 58-foot arm will grapple the spacecraft and attach it to the station, and the covers would protect its cameras from contamination by an inadvertant plume of rocket fuel.
Meanwhile, Olivas will try to install a grapple fixture on another ammonia tank, on the station's starboard side, in preparation for its removal next year. He'll also work on some heater cables outside a docking port on the Unity node.
Discovery and the old ammonia tank are scheduled to depart the station on Tuesday and return to Kennedy Space Center next Thursday.
The tank will be refurbished and sent back to the station on a flight targeted for next March. It's new home will be on the station's starboard side instead of the port side.
Today's work offered some spectacular images of Fuglesang carrying the old tank back to Discovery while riding on the end of the robotic arm.
Take a look at this sequence:
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