Astronauts Perform Second Spacewalk For Hubble Repairs

After successfully installing a new camera on Hubble yesterday, astronauts have already begun their second spacewalk to perform more work on Hubble today.

Today's activities will include replacing old gyroscopes, the devices to help keep Hubble in orbit, as well as batteries. Michael Massimino and Michael Good will be the two guys today performing the work. They will replace all six of the gyroscopes onboard Hubble and three of the 20-year-old batteries.

The spacewalk today is scheduled to last nearly 7 hours like the spacewalk yesterday.

Meanwhile, onboard Space Shuttle Atlantis they had a small issue this morning with the Flash Evaporator. The flash evaporator system's primary A controller had shut down. They swapped over to a backup system, B and everything is working fine again.

Initial readings indicate that it might be ice in the core causing the issue and a core flush could help this problem. The problem has no impact to today's spacewalks and does not pose any threat or concern to the teams at this time.