(ANSA) - Milan, December 2 - European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano on Monday completed his third spacewalk with NASA colleague Andrew Morgan to service the AMS-102 antimatter seeker on the International Space Station, which Parmitano is currently commanding.
They re-entered the ISS after six hours, after installing a new cooling system sooner than expected.
'AstroLuca' installed the new cables and connected the new pump to the tubes of the old device.
The installation will be checked during the next spacewalk.
Parmitano is the first European astronaut to head the ISS.
Parmitano
went outside the International Space Station (ISS) earlier on Monday and
started the toughest in a series of spacewalks he is conducting
with American Andrew Morgan to service the
cosmic-particle-hunting Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02).
The job of Monday's spacewalk, the third in the series, is to
install a new cooling pump.
It is expected to last around seven and a half hours.
Parmitano, the current commander of the International Space
Station (ISS), became the first European to lead a spacewalk
when the series started last month.
The Italian is widely known by his Twitter name AstroLuca,
but he has also been nicknamed Luca Skywalker by his fellow
astronauts.
The current spacewalk series is considered to be the toughest
since work to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, in part because
the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was never intended to be
repaired in space.