In all, expedition 12 Commander Bill McArthur and Flight Engineer Valery Tokarev ventured outside for a five-hour, 43-minute spacewalk to release SuitSat. They also conducted preventative maintenance to a cable-cutting device, and retrieved experiments and photographed the station's exterior. Clad in Russian Orlan spacesuits, McArthur and Tokarev opened the hatch to begin the spacewalk at 5:44 p.m. Eastern Time. It was the fourth career spacewalk for McArthur and the second for Tokarev.

After setting up tools and equipment, they positioned an unneeded Orlan spacesuit on a ladder by the station's Pirs airlock hatch. They outfitted the suit, which had reached the end of its operational life for spacewalks in August 2004, with three batteries, internal sensors and a radio transmitter for this experiment.

The SuitSat provided recorded greetings in six languages to ham radio operators for about two orbits before it stopped transmitting. Ham radio coordinators affiliated with the program said the suit's batteries might have failed in the cold space environment.

NASA officials said the suit will enter Earth's atmosphere and burn up within a few weeks.

Tokarev pushed the suit away toward the aft end of the station as the complex flew 225 miles above the south central Pacific Ocean. The suit initially drifted away at a rate of less than two feet per second, slowly floating out of view below the Zvezda Service Module and its attached Progress cargo craft. The suit is now separating from the station at a rate of about four miles every 90 minutes.

After releasing the SuitSat, McArthur and Tokarev moved from Pirs to the Zarya module, where they removed a hubcap-shaped grapple fixture adapter for the Strela crane. They moved the adapter to Pressurized Mating Adapter-3 on the Unity module. The Strela fixture was moved to prepare Zarya for the future temporary stowage of debris shields.

McArthur and Tokarev made their way to the center truss segment of the station, where they tried and failed to securely install a safety bolt in a contingency cutting device for one of two cables that provide power, data and video to the Mobile Transporter rail car. The transporter moves along the truss to position the Canadarm2 robotic arm correctly for assembly work. The cutter had inadvertently severed the Trailing Umbilical System cable on the Earth-facing side of the transporter on Dec. 16.

After several attempts to drive the bolt with a high-tech screwdriver, McArthur fastened the cable to a handrail via wire instead. That left the cable out of its cutting mechanism, and disabled the Transporter from further movement on the station's rail system for the time being. NASA said the Transporter is not needed for assembly work until the STS-115 mission to install additional truss segments.

Shuttle Discovery crewmembers Piers Sellers and Mike Fossum will replace the severed cable reel mechanism on one of their three scheduled spacewalks during the STS-121 shuttle mission later this year.

As their final spacewalk task, the crew photographed the exterior of Zvezda, including Russian sensors that measure micrometeoroid impacts, handrails, propulsion systems and a ham radio antenna. McArthur and Tokarev then returned to the Pirs airlock and closed the hatch at 11:27 p.m. ET.

Theirs was the 64th spacewalk in support of station assembly and maintenance, the 36th staged from the station, and the 17th conducted from Pirs. In all, station spacewalkers have accumulated 384 hours and 23 minutes outside the facility since December 1998.

Meanwhile in Russia, final preparations were made this week to ship the next Soyuz spacecraft from Moscow to the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch site in Kazakhstan. The spacecraft is scheduled to depart Monday and will launch the 13th station crew in late March.

During the week, the station was maneuvered through a new procedure using guidance and navigation computers in the Destiny laboratory to request firings of the thrusters on the Zvezda module while maintaining overall attitude control through the Control Moment Gyroscopes. That will time in handing orientation control of the station between the U.S. and Russian systems, mission officials said.

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