Spacewalker Bill McArthur, feet anchored at the top of the station's P6 solar array, threw a no-longer-needed 60-pound electrical instrument overboard today, tossing it into its own orbit from which it will eventually fall back into the atmosphere and burn up.

"I'm ready to throw a Hail Mary," he radioed mission control. "He drops back in the pocket... "

"Bill, we are go for jettison," astronaut Rick Linnehan radioed from Houston.

McArthur then tossed the floating potential probe, or FPP, overboard on a trajectory behind and about 30 degrees above the path of the space station. Television views from fellow spacewalker Valery Tokarev's helmet cam showed the instrument tumbling away in the dark night of space.

"I'll tell you guys, I'm happy with that," McArthur radioed. "How's that for a Hail Mary pass?"

"That was pretty impressive," Linnehan replied.

The astronauts spent a few minutes discussing a bit of debris seen drifting away in the same general direction as the FPP, but engineers concluded it did not pose a threat to the station.


Video coverage for subscribers only:
VIDEO: SCIENCE PROBE TOSSED OVERBOARD BY SPACEWALKER PLAY
VIDEO: VIDEO RECEIVED FROM THE STATION'S NEW CAMERA PLAY
VIDEO: SPACEWALKERS TRAVERSE OUTSIDE BETWEEN TASKS PLAY
VIDEO: CAMERA UMBILICALS HOOKED UP TO THE STATION PLAY
VIDEO: INSTALLATION OF THE NEW TV CAMERA BEGINS PLAY
VIDEO: THE CREW MAKE ITS WAY TO PORT 1 TRUSS PLAY
VIDEO: SPACEWALKERS RETRIEVE TRIPOD FOR TV CAMERA PLAY
VIDEO: VALVE POSITIONING ERROR DELAYS START OF EVA PLAY
VIDEO: SPACEWALK PREVIEW BRIEFING DIAL-UP | BROADBAND
VIDEO: NARRATED ANIMATION OF SPACEWALK TASKS PLAY
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McArthur and Tokarev were running well ahead of schedule when the FPP was released three hours and 40 minutes into the spacewalk. They delayed the jettison slightly to complete a get-ahead task that had been planned for the end of the excursion, removing a radiator rotary controller from the right-side solar array truss.

Earlier, they installed a television camera on the port 1 segment that will be needed for improved visibility next year when a shuttle crew adds another segment to the truss.

"It's hard to imagine how blind you are inside the station to see yourself," McArthur said in a pre-flight interview. "These types of camera views are critically important to doing robotics operations."

The final get-ahead task performed was replacement of a faulty circuit breaker in a mobile transporter that moves along the solar array truss. The circuit breaker provides redundant power to heaters in the transporter.

The two men returned to the airlock to wrap up the successful five-hour 22-minute spacewalk, accomplishing all of their primary and secondary objectives. The outing started at 10:32 a.m. and ended at 3:54 p.m. with the start of airlock repressurization.

The excursion began about an hour behind schedule because of an apparent procedural error on the part of the crew that required them to repressurize part of the airlock in order to properly set a critical valve. Once that was done, the lock was depressurized without incident.

This was the 63rd spacewalk devoted to station assembly and maintenance, the third by McArthur and the first by Tokarev. It marked the 18th staged from the Quest airlock module but the first since a contamination issue in the module's heat exchanger forced station crews to rely solely on a Russian airlock at the aft end of the outpost. The last spacewalk staged from Quest occurred in April 2003.

With the completion of today's excursion, 41 U.S. astronauts, 12 Russian cosmonauts and three men from Japan, Canada and France have logged 378 hours and 40 minutes of spacewalk time building the international outpost.