Trim Missions Succeeds

ANN REAL TIME NEWS: 1630 EDT -- It worked. Discovery astronaut Stephen Robinson didn't even need his homemade hacksaw.

After extensive preparations for an EVA they didn't prepare for on the ground, Robinson's mission to trim excess gap filler from two places on the shuttle's belly turned out to be as easy reaching up with his gloved hand and pulling the whisps of ceramic-covered material away from the orbiter.

"I'm grasping and pulling," he said. "It's coming out very easily... beautiful."

Robinson was standing on a work station mounted at the very end of the shuttle's robotic arm as he was swung out from the cargo bay, around the side of the shuttle and then underneath Discovery where he work on the two spots where gap-filler protruded from the vehicle.

Of course, how can one go into space without noticing the view? Robinson called the journey aboard the robotic arm the "ride of the century."

"My eyes have never seen such a sight," he told his fellow astronauts and Mission Control.

After pulling the gap-filler from the second place where it protruded from the orbiter, Robinson pronounced, "It looks like this big patient is cured."

0620 EDT -- With a makeshift hacksaw in hand, Discovery astronaut Stephen Robinson is making his way to the orbiter's underbelly, hoping to tug, saw or snip two dangling pieces of ceramic-covered fabric. If left untouched, NASA worries those gap-filler strips could cause overheating upon re-entry and threaten the shuttle itself.

“OK Andy, I’m in the great outdoors,” Robinson told fellow Discovery astronaut Andrew Thomas as he stepped out of Discovery's airlock. Together with his spacewalking partner, Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, Robinson first set about installing a work platform at the end of the shuttle's 58-foot long robotic arm.

The arm was to carry Robinson to the shuttle's heat-protected underside, where he would address the two strings of gap-filler.

Confidence in the repair process was high back on the ground.

“We feel very comfortable we have a very doable task,” David Wolf, head of the Johnson Space Center’s spacewalk branch, told the Associated Press. “Delicate is the word we want to stay with while we are at the bottom of the orbiter. We don’t want to touch the tile if we can avoid it at all.”

FMI: www.nasa.gov