At 5:49 p.m. EDT, astronauts Danny Olivas and Nicole Stott began the first of three spacewalks scheduled during the STS-128 mission. The spacewalk is scheduled to last 6.5 hours. Olivas, the STS-128 lead spacewalker, is wearing a spacesuit marked with solid red stripes. Stott is wearing a spacesuit with broken red stripes.
For this spacewalk, the spacewalkers will remove an empty ammonia tank from the station’s truss and temporarily stow it on the station’s robotic arm. Olivas and Stott also will retrieve the European Technology Exposure Facility (EuTEF) and Materials International Space Station Experiment (MISSE) from the Columbus module and install them on Discovery’s payload bay for return. During the spacewalk, crew members inside the station will begin relocating the COLBERT treadmill, crew quarters, and atmospheric revitalization racks from the Leonardo module to Node 2.