|
<p>Stle astronauts began the first of five spacewalks slated for this fourth and final servicing mission on the Hubble Space Telescope at 8:52 a.m. Eastern time Thursday. They <a halled a new wide-field camera and swapped out</a>ata router that began malfunctioning in September of last year. Two astronauts are shown above approaching Hubble on <a h TV</a>>
p>
Bno matter what the astronauts are doing, any Shuttle crew’s extravehicular activities are awe-inspiring and mesmerizing. In this Wired Science mini-gallery, we trace the history of the spacewalk with photos from NASA.</p>
a
- l h
White, the first American to walk in space, hangs out during the Gemini 4 mission. He's attached to the craft by both umbilical and tether lines. <p a
- l h
ty Schweickart stands outside Apollo 9's Lunar Module. (Apollo 9 didn't go to the moon. It was an Earth-orbiting testing mission.) <p a
- l h
ce McCandless II took the first untethered space walk in February 1984. Here we see him from Challenger, floating above Earth. <p a
- l h
hard Hieb, Thomas Akers, and Pierre Thuot hold on to the 4.5 ton INTELSAT VI communications satellite during a 1992 mission. <p a
- l h
hy Thornton prepares to send a broken solar panel from Hubble plunging toward atmospheric incineration. Astronauts successfully replaced the damaged panel in 1993. What looks like the Deathstar is actually Earth. <p a
- l h
David Low practiced handling heavy stuff in space by using Peter J.K. Wisoff as a stand-in for Hubble components in 1993. <p a
- l h
l Meade and Mark Lee (right) rehearse spacewalk contingency plans in 1994. <p a
- l g
n a piece of the International Space Station's solar array was torn in November 2007, astronaut Scott Parazynski took a ride on the station's robotic arm to patch up the live electrical panel. That wild maneuver kept enough juice flowing to the station to support the full battery of international experiments. <p>Ies: All courtesy of NASA. First image screengrabbed by <a hhbeck</a>>
