NASA immediately put together a team of experts to determine whether there's any way the crew can pry or hammer the pin loose during a spacewalk Monday - the third and final of shuttle Discovery's mission.
The lead spacewalk officer in Mission Control, Glenda Laws-Brown, said since there is no up or down in space, Acaba apparently installed the clamplike pin upside down - "180 degrees out from where it should have been."
"Even with it being installed in the opposite location, he just drew a card of bad luck ... if it had been rotated just a little bit more or maybe a little bit less, it might have cleared just fine," she told reporters Saturday night.
"Some days you're lucky, and some days you're less lucky."
The equipment storage platform ended up being partially deployed on the space station's framework. To keep it from flapping around, Swanson tied it down with tethers before heading inside.
Those tethers, however, have a certified lifetime of just three months out in space. As a result, engineers were looking at a more permanent solution in case the platform remains jammed.
Saturday's 6½-hour excursion was the second in three days for the crew of shuttle Discovery. On Thursday, Swanson and another astronaut installed the final pair of solar wings at the orbiting outpost. The panels were unfurled Friday.
The latest spacewalk was just as busy but lacked the drama associated with the multimillion dollar, high-priority solar wings.
NASA was still basking in that success, telling the astronauts in a wake-up message that the space station "now looks like the artist renderings that we've been seeing for years. A day to celebrate!"
As soon as they floated outside, Swanson and Acaba, a former Florida schoolteacher making his first spacewalk, made their way all the way to the end of the space station's power-grid framework.
They loosened bolts holding down batteries that will be replaced on the next shuttle visit in June.
A space station alarm went off as the spacewalkers wrapped up that job. The gyroscopes that were maintaining the position of the station-shuttle complex became overloaded from the astronauts' work on the end of the truss. Discovery quickly assumed control with its thrusters.
"Nothing to worry about," Mission Control assured the astronauts.
The spacewalkers then moved on to the equipment storage platform, where they encountered all the trouble. Mission Control finally ordered them to give up and move on to installing a Global Positioning System antenna and photographing a pair of radiators, one of which has a peeling cover.
By then, there was no time to set up any equipment shelving on the opposite side of the station. The platforms are meant to hold large spare parts, especially important once NASA's shuttles stop flying.
Some of the spacewalking chores that the astronauts managed to complete were added just this past week. The GPS antenna work on the Japanese laboratory, for instance, was supposed to occur on a later spacewalk that ended up being canceled because of Discovery's repeated launch delays.
The shuttle will depart the space station Wednesday, eight days after arriving, and return to Earth next Saturday.
NEW YORK AND TRI-STATE AREA NEWS
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