International Space Station gets delivery for Christmas

In under an hour, Nasa’s Commander Scott Kelly and flight engineer Timothy Kopra were able to release the brake handles by hitting it twice, and then guided it back into place.

Overall, it was a “textbook” spacewalk, Navias said, with Kelly relaxed enough to stop and take a selfie while orbiting 225 miles above the Earth’s surface.

In Mission Control, astronaut Mike Hopkins cautioned them to avoid making accidental contact with the rail vehicle since it wasn’t secured into its usual spot.

The problem involves the space station’s robotic arm, which moves from place to place along the station’s central truss aboard a sort of miniature rail auto.

Americans Scott Kelly and Tim Kopra spent the weekend preparing their spacesuits and planning to fix the mobile transporter unit, which got stuck just four inches (1o cm) from where it needs to be to grapple an incoming ship launching from Kazakhstan slated to arrive Wednesday.

The mobile transport system is normally used to transport people and equipment, including the station’s big robot arm.

For the remainder of the spacewalk, the duo tackled several tasks, including rerouting an Ethernet cable for use in a future Russian science module and putting down cables for future global docking adaptors that will let commercial spacecraft attach to the station. The spacewalk marked the seventh in 2015, and the 191 since ISS assembly began in 1998.

“This is a team effort”, Kelly said.

Launch of the Progress cargo ship is scheduled for 3:44 a.m. EST on Monday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and also can be seen on NASA TV.

The spacewalk lasted three hours and 16 minutes.

British astronaut Tim Peake travelled to the ISS last week and will spend six months aboard the craft.

The spacewalk will be Kelly’s third since he began a yearlong mission in March, and the second of Kopra’s career.