Astronauts complete final space walk
Submitted by Sam Ross on May 28, 2011 - 12:07pm
The astronauts in the final spacewalk moved the robotic arm of Endeavour to its new home. The robotic arm is 50 foot in size and it will be placed on International Space Station.
The spacewalk was the last spacewalk of NASA’s space shuttle mission. In the 12 years of shuttle missions, NASA astronauts completed 1000 hours of spacewalk.
Astronauts did the spacewalk for about five hours and passed the 1000 hours of spacewalk mark. Astronauts and cosmonauts have spent this time for the maintenance of space shuttles and space station.
The final spacewalk was the historic spacewalk for the Endeavour crew due to many reasons. This spacewalk was the final spacewalk for Endeavour as well as for the any shuttle crew. This is because NASA’s final space shuttle mission of Atlantis will not be having any spacewalk. Now only the Space Station crew will be conducting the spacewalk whenever needed.
Astronauts Greg Chamitoff and Mike Fincke completed the historic spacewalk in the morning. Their main work was to remove the huge robotic arm from space shuttle and attach it to the International Space Station.
The reason why astronauts placed the additional robotic arm in the space station is because Endeavour is retiring after this mission and NASA wants additional robotic arm to work on the orbiter.
After attaching additional robotic arm on the space station the two astronauts unloaded the rest of the stuff for the space station. It also includes a spare arm. The spare arm costs $200 million and is built in Canada.
The spare robotic arm is 12 foot tall with a 30 foot wingspan. It will be responsible for almost all the maintenance work outside the space station. It will also cut the additional dangerous space walk for the astronauts.
For the Endeavour space crew there are five more days left for their mission before they return to the Earth completing the last flight of Endeavour.
