Astronauts Install Handmade Snares in 3-Hr. Space Walk

Working like clumsy surgeons wearing backpacks and mittens, two astronauts ventured outside the cabin of the space shuttle Discovery today and strapped two homemade snares to the tip of the craft’s robotic arm in hopes of saving an $80-million satellite.

The three-hour, unrehearsed space walk paved the way for a real surgeon aboard the Discovery, Dr. Margaret Rhea Seddon, to reach out with the robotic arm Wednesday morning and try to trip a lever on a Hughes communications satellite that is drifting uselessly in orbit.

Engineers believe the lever, located on the side of the spinning satellite, did not open when the satellite was released from the shuttle Saturday, thus failing to start a series of maneuvers, including firing the satellite’s powerful rocket.

The awkward, tedious task of strapping the crude devices on the tip of the robotic arm was carried out cheerfully by David Griggs, 45, a former Navy fighter pilot, and Jeffrey A. Hoffman, 40, an astrophysicist.

“Is that beautiful or is that not beautiful,” Hoffman said as he praised his own efforts to attach one of two devices to the end of the arm. The devices, called “fly swatters” because that is sort of what they looked like in their early stages of design, were made by the Discovery’s crew from plastic book covers and other cannibalized materials aboard the shuttle.

Before returning to the confines of the shuttle, the astronauts relished a few moments of freedom. At one point, Griggs drifted over the side of the shuttle’s cargo bay and disappeared completely at the end of his tether.

“Dave, get back into the bay,” he was ordered.

He somersaulted back in, and later astronaut Jerry Ross in Mission Control rated his acrobatic performance.

“All the score cards have been tallied,” Ross said. “For degree of difficulty, a 10. For performance, 0.2.”

The real test will come Wednesday when Seddon--the only woman among the seven crew members--attempts a delicate operation. From inside the Discovery, the 37-year-old emergency room veteran will try to move the end of the robotic arm to within inches of the satellite to snag a 6-inch lever. The trick will be to snag the lever, pulling it open without hitting the satellite and damaging its delicate solar cells or knocking it into a wobble.

She will have only six and a half minutes to do that at about 6 a.m. PST, just as the satellite crosses the Equator over the Atlantic Ocean. If she misses that window, the satellite would not end up in the right orbit, even if she successfully trips the lever.