Failed Coolant Pump Finally Removed Outside Station

After 13-and-a-half hours of spacewalking work that spanned two excursions outside the International Space Station, a failed coolant module finally is fixed to a temporary stowage spot.

Working in tandem 200 miles above Earth, U.S. astronauts Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell-Dyson mounted the 780-pound pump module -- which is about the size and shape of a bathtub -- to the station's mobile rail cart. That capped a two-spacewalk effort to extract the failed pump from a slot inside the station's central truss.

A jammed fluid line connector and a leak of toxic ammonia prevented the two astronauts from finishing the job during an eight-hour, three-minute outing last Saturday.

Wheelock and Caldwell-Dyson mounted the pump module on the mobile rail cart five-hours and 27 minutes into today's spacewalk.

The two astronauts now are headed to an external storage platform on the central truss. There, they will prep one of four spare pump modules at the station for installation on a third spacewalk on Sunday. Wheelock and Caldwell-Dyson will pull the spare off the pallet-like platform Sunday and install in the slot where the failed pump had been located.