Spacewalking astronauts give solar arrays a boost

Two astronauts installed new batteries outside the International Space Station Wednesday, with help from Canadian mission specialist Julie Payette.

Dave Wolf and Chris Cassidy began the third spacewalk of the STS-127 mission at 10:32 a.m. ET — half an hour early, NASA said.

The astronauts' main task was to replace four of the six batteries on the station's oldest solar array. As of 3 p.m. ET, two of the new batteries had been installed and were working well, NASA reported on Twitter.

Payette's job had been to work with Endeavour shuttle pilot Doug Hurley to move the container of new batteries to the worksite before the start of the spacewalk using the space station's Canadian-made robotic arm.

Prior to moving the batteries, Wolf and Cassidy helped prepare Japanese experiments sitting on a platform next to the Kibo laboratory for transfer to the section of the lab referred to by NASA as its "porch."

That new section, brought up with the Endeavour last week and attached to the space station on Saturday, is designed to allow experiments to be exposed directly to the cold, radiation and other extreme conditions in space.

The experiments are to be moved by the Japanese Kibo robotic arm Thursday.