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U.S. astronauts complete repair work on ISS cooling system

Xinhua, November 7, 2015 Adjust font size:

A pair of U.S. astronauts on Friday successfully completed their second spacewalk in less than two weeks mainly aimed at completing a repair job on the cooling system of the International Space Station (ISS).

Scott Kelly, who is in the middle of a year-long mission aboard the ISS, and flight engineer Kjell Lindgren ended their spacewalk at 2:10 p.m. EST (1910 GMT), which lasted seven hour and 48 minutes, nearly 80 minutes longer than expected.

"The astronauts restored the port truss (P6) ammonia cooling system to its original configuration, the main task for today's spacewalk," U.S. space agency NASA said in a statement. "They also returned ammonia to the desired levels in both the prime and backup systems."

Through a spacewalk conducted in November 2012, astronauts tried to isolate a suspected ammonia leak in the cooling system by re-plumbing the system to a backup radiator. The leak persisted and was subsequently traced to a different component that was replaced during a spacewalk in May 2013.

A minor departure from the planned tasks was that the astronauts ran out of time to cinch and cover the accordion-like backup radiator, NASA said.

The backup radiator, which Lindgren retracted earlier in the spacewalk, was fully redeployed and locked into place in a dormant state, the space agency said.

Friday's spacewalk was the second for both astronauts in nine days, and the 190th in support of assembly and maintenance of the orbiting laboratory.

Crew members have now spent a total of 1,192 hours and 4 minutes working outside the ISS. Endit