A U.S. astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut completed a 5-1/2-hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Tuesday to install a device that monitors conditions around the orbital outpost, according to Reuters. Engineers believe electrical charges triggered glitches that caused Russian space capsules returning from the station to land hard and off-course during two consecutive homecomings in October 2007 and April 2008. Flight controllers staged a spacewalk in July to disconnect suspect equipment on the last Soyuz capsule, circumventing the problem for its landing in October. In search of more data, Russian flight controllers late Monday dispatched station commander Michael Fincke, a veteran of four previous spacewalks, and flight engineer Yury Lonchakov, who made his first spacewalk, to install a probe to monitor electrical fields near where Soyuz capsules park. "The space station is this big, old huge chunk of metal flying through a magnetic field," deputy program manager Kirk Shireman told reporters last week. "There's an electron cloud flowing around the station at all times. And then the station itself generates electricity." Fincke and Lonchakov quickly completed the primary task of their spacewalk, then installed two science experiments to the outside of the station's module. But when it came time to test new gear, flight controllers could not get any data to the ground. With time running out, flight directors told the men to retrieve one of the experiments and head back to the airlock. "We've done everything we could," Finke, speaking Russian, said through a translator. The station, a $100 billion project of 16 nations, is nearing completion after more than a decade of construction. Next year, NASA and its partners plan to expand the station's live-aboard crew size from three members to six. NASA's next mission to the station is scheduled for February.
