Astronauts Bob Behnken and Nicholas Patrick switched their suits to battery power at 9:17 p.m. EST, signifying the start of the first of three STS-130 spacewalks. Behnken, the lead spacewalker for the mission, will wear a spacesuit marked with solid red stripes. This will be his fourth spacewalk – his first three, during the STS-123 mission in 2008, totaled 19 hours and 19 minutes. Patrick, a first-time spacewalker, will wear an all-white suit.
Mission Specialist Steve Robinson will work inside the space station as the intravehicular officer, or spacewalk choreographer. Pilot Terry Virts and Mission Specialist Kay Hire will be working the robotic arm’s controls.
The first order of business will be the preparation of the new Tranquility node for installation on the Unity node. Behnken will begin by moving to Unity and opening a flap that will expose Unity’s centerline camera, which will be used to line up the two nodes during installation. He will then remove eight contamination covers from the port on Tranquility that will be docked to Unity. While Behnken is doing so, Patrick will begin by installing an electric circuit on the avionics panel of Tranquility and removing cables that provide the node power from the shuttle before its installation.
Today’s spacewalk is expected to last about 6.5-hours.