Astronauts at the International Space Station completed a seven-hour space walk hundreds of miles above Earth on Saturday, fixing up equipment to develop the orbiting laboratory, the US space agency NASA said.
Two US astronauts, Peggy Whitson and Dan Tani, completed the spacewalk at 1654 GMT after moving and wiring up heavy hardware to a recently-installed module called Harmony, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said in a statement.
"The seven-hour and four minute excursion started an hour and 10 minutes early. They completed their main tasks well ahead of the timeline then moved on to perform some get-ahead work," it said.
They moved a 300-pound (136-kilogram) fluid tray to the module on the side of the station and connected fluid and electrical links.
"They used a kind of relay technique, one moving ahead and attaching tethers to be ready to receive the tray, then the other moving farther forward to take the next handoff," the NASA statement explained.
Tani also inspected a faulty part of a rotating solar panel and Whitson fixed up cables for powering shuttles docked at the station. She also prepared the parts that will lock a new European laboratory to the station.
They installed a portable foot restraint for use on future spacewalks to install the European laboratory, Columbus, due to be delivered on the next shuttle mission in early December. Another, the Japanese Kibo lab, is due to be delivered in early 2008.
The United States hopes to develop the station as a possible jumping-off point for manned missions to Mars. The 100-billion-dollar (70.3-billion-euro) project, involving 16 countries, is due to be complete within three years.
