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Spacewalk a success BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: July 12, 2006 Astronauts Piers Sellers and Mike Fossum re-entered the space station's Quest airlock module, closed the hatch and began repressurization at 2:31 p.m. to officially end the third and final spacewalk planned for Discovery's mission. The 68th spacewalk staged in the space station era lasted seven hours and 11 minutes, pushing Sellers' and Fossum's three-EVA total to 21 hours and 29 minutes. The total for all 68 station-era spacewalks now stands at 412 hours and 23 minutes by 42 U.S. astronauts, 13 Russian cosmonauts, one Frenchman, one Canadian and one Japanese astronaut. Sellers, a veteran of three previous spacewalks, has now logged 41 hours and 10 minutes of EVA time. Today's spacewalk ran 41 minutes longer than originally planned after flight controllers asked the astronauts to move a robot arm grapple fixture to a different mounting point on the station's hull. "Time for dinner and a shower," Sellers said as he finally made his way to the airlock." Sellers and Fossum completed simulated repairs of five out of 10 samples of nose cap and wing leading edge material mounted in a pallet at the back of the shuttle's cargo bay. Using a high-tech caulk gun, the astronauts squeezed out dollops of NOAX, a heat-resistant sealant, and used spatulas to spread the material into cracks and gouges. A major question mark was how the thick material would up in the extreme temperatures and weightless environment of space. Trapped air can cause bubbles that, in turn, can affect the materia's ability to reject heat. "I'm looking at (sample) 4," Fossum said as he wrapped up the second of two repairs. "The bubbles ... appear only to be in the finishing layer. They're so small, kind of like a rash, they're not the big ones that seem to come up when you're lifing a lot of material. This will be very interesting to see how it cures out over the next week or so. When I finished them, they both looked very much alike. Now, 3 has noticeable bubbles that have formed under the surface. One of them at least is probably three or four millimeters across." During cleanup, the astronauts did an inventory of their tools to make sure nothing was left behind. "So Mike, you have six total spatulas, is that correct?" pilot Mark Kelly asked. "Negative, five," Fossum said, indirectly referring to one that was lost earlier by Sellers. "OK, yeah, that's correct," Kelly said. "Rub it in, Mark, rub it in," Sellers laughed. "I'm not rubbing it in. It's been a long day." "You're torturing me," Sellers said. "That was my favorite spatch." Flight controllers later told the astronauts not to worry about it, that the spatula did not pose any sort of "FOD" (foreign object debris) threat in the cargo bay.
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