Indian-American astronaut Sunita 'Suni' Williams joined an elite group of eight other female spacewalkers as she and her veteran colleague Robert Curbeam ventured outside the International Space Station to dislodge a troublesome solar array but failed to get it folded.
This prompted NASA to add an extra walk in space to get the job done.
NASA, on Saturday, added an unscheduled spacewalk and an extra day to the shuttle Discovery's mission to the orbiting spacelab so astronauts can make another attempt to retract a jammed solar panel.
The added spacewalk, which was earlier being debated, will now be the fourth since Discovery's crew began an overhaul of the station's electrical power distribution system early last week. It will be on Monday.
The 110-foot-long, accordion-style panel jammed Wednesday.
As the shuttle crew issued commands to retract, the panel bunched with about 60 feet still outstretched. Sunita made her spacewalk debut during Saturday's activity, which prompted wishes from Mission Control as she stepped outside the space station's airlock. "It's going to be a blast," she said.
Only seven other US women and a single Russian woman have participated in the 281 spacewalks taken since 1965.
"Welcome to the club, Suni," Curbeam told her. The two astronauts spent over nearly eight hours outside the ISS to complete the rewiring of the ISS's power system during the mission's third spacewalk.
"Beamer, you've been amazingly effective," NASA astronaut Steve Robinson told Curbeam from Mission Control here at the Johnson Space Center, and later lauded both spacewalkers.
"We really commend you for a tremendous effort, an Olympian effort of our two shaking EVA members Curbeam and Williams spent about two hours of their long spacewalk perched just below the portside wing of the P6 solar array, which had been parked half-furled since Wednesday after folding troubles popped up during its retraction," Robinson said.
Friction between guide wires, three of which run the length of each 115-foot solar wing panel, and the grommets they thread through were thought to be the problem's source.
Using a start-and-stop method, in which astronauts inside the ISS alternately retracted the solar array slightly and stopped so the spacewalkers could shake out any snags, appeared to work well.
"For a while, we really thought that we were going to get this retracted on this EVA," said Tricia Mack, NASA's lead spacewalk officer for Discovery's STS-116 mission, adding that spacesuit consumables were the only limitation. "We all firmly believe that had we had more time, we would have been able to get it in there... we just ran out of time."
Before Curbeam and Williams even began performing what flight controllers ultimately dubbed "Beamer shakes" and "Suni shakes," mission managers approved plans to add a fourth spacewalk to the joint docked operations between the station's Expedition 14 crew and the shuttle Discovery's STS-11 6 astronauts.
Robinson said the extra spacewalk effectively adds a full day to Discovery's mission, with undocking now coming on Tuesday and landing on Dec 22.
