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American Morning

Shuttle Astronauts Winding Up Second Spacewalk

Aired March 05, 2002 - 07:50   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Shuttle astronauts are winding up their second spacewalk this morning. We'll show you some live pictures. Braving the rigors of space today is a new team of Columbia astronauts, Jim Newman and Mike Massimino. They begin their nearly seven - or they begin, rather, their nearly seven-hour long walk very early this morning, should be wrapping it up today on the Hubble space telescope pretty soon.

CNN's space correspondent Mile O'Brien joins us now from Atlanta. Hey Miles.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN SPACE CORRESPONDENT: How are you doing Anderson? You know, they were - they were wrapped up with their chores, and they've got so far ahead of their tasks that NASA actually heaped on a few more honey-dos, if you will, I guess.

Take a look. Hey, there's a $300,000 cordless screwdriver you're looking at right now. If you're a U.S. taxpayer, you paid for a portion of that right now, carried by $20,000 gloves. That's your space program at work there, and what you're looking at right now is the spacewalkers doing those get-ahead tasks. They're actually opening up some panels, positioning some things for some of the later spacewalks of this mission.

There are five of them in all. This was spacewalk number two. The primary goal in all of this, having a few problems there with those port settings. Look at that. We'll have to figure out what's going on there, but they - it's a computer-generated port setting in this thing. It's dial-in stuff. It's pretty complicated Makita (ph) drill, if you will, but nevertheless, it works pretty well generally.

Let's look at some of the pictures you've been watching all night as the spacewalkers did their tasks. You know Massimino, who's at the end of the robotic arm here in this picture, use -- installing part of the installation, I should say, of the solar ray, and it's this rigid thing right here, which opens up like a book.

Now what's interesting about Massimino is he's not just a spacewalker rookie, he's a space rookie. A lot of confidence placed in him, and he was a little bit clumsy at the start, but he got his space legs pretty quickly, and off to the races he went, doing his tasks just as if he was in the tank, the pool there in Houston where they do all of their work. Now the other tasks that was involved was the installation of a new gyroscope. Take a look at this. This is up here, once again, at the end of the arm there, Massimino, there's that fancy cordless screwdriver once again. This gyroscope, which you see right here, shut down inexplicably last year. It's working now, but NASA said you know as long as we're going to be here, and it's kind of hard to get up here to do any service runs, let's change it out.

It's important to have good gyroscopes to give you pictures like this. Remember Shoemaker Levy 9 (ph)? That's the comic that went into Jupiter. Hubble got the best images of that. Look at these shots of nebular, which are essentially star formations in their earlier stages.

And some proof of black holes, the first ever. Some of these images - you have to have a steady instrument that can point precisely, and that's what that gyroscope change-out is all about, Anderson. The spacewalk's still underway, as you say, approaching the seven-hour mark. Things going well so far.

Tomorrow is the big one, Anderson. Open-heart surgery on the Hubble. They'll take out the power control unit and shut down the Hubble for the first time in a dozen years since it was launched. Astronomers the world over will be turning blue, hoping when they turn it on, it fires back up.

COOPER: Amazing pictures Miles. Thanks very much.

O'BRIEN: My pleasure.

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