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Space station astronauts conduct spacewalk to finish cooling system repairs

Xinhua, November 6, 2015 Adjust font size:

A pair of U.S. astronauts on Friday ventured outside the International Space Station for their second spacewalk in less than two weeks to finish a cooling system repair job.

Scott Kelly, who is in the middle of a year-long mission aboard the station, and flight engineer Kjell Lindgren started the spacewalk about a hour earlier than planned at 6:22 a.m. EST (1122 GMT), which is expected to last six hours and 30 minutes.

The objective of the spacewalk is to restore an ammonia cooling system to its original configuration on one of the station's trusses.

The system was taken offline in November 2012 due to a suspected ammonia leak, which was subsequently traced to a different component that was replaced during a spacewalk in May 2013.

"Now leak-free, officials decided to restore the port truss cooling system to its primary method of dispelling heat," NASA said in a statement.

The spacewalk is the 190th in support of space station assembly and maintenance and the second in nine days for Kelly, who just broke the record for the longest that a U.S. astronaut has lived in space, and for Lindgren. Endi