An American and a Russian astronaut will conduct a spacewalk from their orbiting space station on Thursday — one week after an earlier outing had to be aborted due to a spacesuit glitch.
A spokesman at Russian Mission Control said Monday that NASA astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka would leave the international space station at 1:40 a.m. Moscow time on July 1 (5:40 p.m. ET June 30) for a six-hour spacewalk to conduct a repair job on the outside of the vessel.
The repair had to be called off last Thursday a quarter an hour after it started, when controllers determined that Fincke’s oxygen supply appeared to be leaking into space. NASA said later that the problem was a faulty switch.
The pair have to replace an electrical switch that has disabled one of four large gyroscopes that keep the 200-ton station stable in flight and keep its solar-power arrays pointed toward the sun.
