The crews of the space shuttle Endeavour and the International Space Station on Saturday installed a four-ton "porch" to the station's Japanese laboratory. US astronauts Dave Wolf and Timothy Kopra completed a five-hour, 32-minute spacewalk to prepare the way for astronauts using a robotic arm inside the station to attach the outdoor shelf to the Kibo module, DPA reported. It was the first of five spacewalks during Endeavour's mission that are among the most complex in the 11-year history of the ISS. The porch, delivered to the station in Endeavour's cargo bay, will be used to expose scientific experiments to the extremities of space through X-ray cameras and studies of cosmic dust. Tesuro Yokoyama, deputy project manager of the Kibo effort for the Japanese Space Agency, called the installation a "proud moment."
