Spacewalk complete, Canadian robot tooled up

By Ed Stoddard

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Dextre the handyman space robot now has the tools of his trade and is ready for work.

Astronauts from the shuttle Endeavour outfitted the International Space Station's newly installed robotic maintenance man with tools and cameras during a seven-hour spacewalk that ended early Tuesday.

Veteran spacewalker Richard Linnehan and rookie Robert Behnken conducted the outing.

"It's a pretty awesome view just looking down on everything," Linnehan commented at one point as the duo floated in space over 200 miles above the planet.

It was the third of five spacewalks scheduled for Endeavour's busy 12-day visit to the orbital outpost.

"I consider this a real success for the team. ... It was a great day," Zebulon Scoville, the chief spacewalk officer for the mission, said at a briefing at the Johnson Space Center.

The outing was mostly smooth but not quite glitch-free.

The astronauts battled to secure a science experiment outside of Europe's Columbus laboratory and in the end took it back to the shuttle's payload bay.

The Canadian-built robot, dubbed Dextre, was assembled during the mission's second spacewalk. It resembles a humanoid stick figure with gangly 11-foot (3.4 meter) arms.

NASA says it will save astronauts from much of the routine maintenance they currently do on arduous and potentially dangerous spacewalks, enabling them to devote more time to the experiments and other scientific activities.

Later Tuesday after their sleep period, the space crews will move Dextre by remote control to its base on the U.S. space laboratory Destiny.

The shuttle crew arrived at the station Wednesday to install Dextre and deliver a storage room for an elaborate Japanese laboratory that is due to arrive during NASA's next shuttle mission in May.

NASA has 10 more flights planned to complete the $100 billion space station and deliver supplies before the shuttles are retired in 2010. A final servicing call to the Hubble Space Telescope also is scheduled for late summer.

During their fourth spacewalk on Thursday, the Endeavour crew plans to test a heat shield repair technique that NASA wants to demonstrate before sending astronauts to work on Hubble.

The Hubble repair crew will not be able to reach the space station for shelter in case their ship is too damaged to return to Earth. NASA added inspections and developed a rudimentary heat shield repair kit after losing the shuttle Columbia and seven astronauts in 2003 due to damage caused when a piece of debris hit the ship during liftoff.

(Editing by Doina Chiacu)