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   The hatch on the Russian Pirs docking compartment was opened at 3:05 p.m.EDT., about 45 minutes later than scheduled.

A few problems occurred in the preparations for the spacewalk.U.S.flight engineer Sunita Williams, who is not one of the spacewalkers, worked on some of these problems.

She is advising and helping with the activities of her two fellow space travelers.She is officially called the intravehicular officer for the event.Seventeen aluminum protective panels were left outside of the Space Station in an adaptive assembly nicknamed the ldquo;Christmas tree rdquo;.

They are officially called the Service Module Debris Protection (SMDP) panels.The SMDP panels will be installed on the Zvezda Service Module (ZSM).The panels are about 2 feet by 3 feet in dimensions and weight (on Earth) about 20 pounds.

They will help protect the ISS from small- and medium-sized space debris, such as natural occurring micro-meteoroids and artificially made pieces from launch vehicles.As of 5:22 p.m.CDT, the spacewalking cosmonauts have just repaired a GPS (global positioning system) navigation antenna that was broken.

The GPS antenna will be used with the European Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), an unmanned cargo vehicle scheduled to arrive for its maiden visit to the International Space Station later in 2007.During their spacewalks, the two cosmonauts will also place canisters containing biological experiments from the Earth outside the Space Station.The future June 6th spacewalk, which begins at about 10:30 a.m., will also be shown live on beginning at 10 a.m.

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