Astronauts successfully install solar wings

CAPE CANAVERAL -- Spacewalking astronauts installed the last set of solar wings at the international space station Thursday, accomplishing the top job of shuttle Discovery's mission.

Steven Swanson and Richard Arnold II struggled with some cable connections, but managed to hook everything up.

"It wasn't quite as smooth as we had hoped, but those guys did a great job," astronaut Joseph Acaba told Mission Control.

The next milestone will be Friday, when the folded-up solar wings are unfurled.

Manpower was needed inside and out to attach the $300 million segment to the space station. Swanson and Arnold helped their colleagues inside the shuttle-space station complex cautiously move the 31,000-pound, 45-foot-long girder into position with a robotic arm.

"Keep coming," one of the spacewalkers said. "It really looks good to me."

The actual attachment occurred an hour into the spacewalk, and the hookups were completed two hours later.

Discovery delivered the new wings earlier this week. It's the final of solar wings to be installed at the 10-year-old space station and will bring it to full power. It's also the last major American-made piece of the space station.

Before winding up their spacewalk, Swanson and Arnold released and removed the locks and cinches holding down the solar wings. That will allow the 115-foot wings to be extended on Friday, an even more nerve-racking procedure than the one Thursday. The last time astronauts tried to unfurl a solar wing in 2007, it snagged on a guide wire and ripped. Emergency repairs were required.

Six solar wings already are in place at the space station. The new ones will bring the number to eight, with four wings on each side.

The space station "is almost symmetric, looking forward to that becoming permanent today," Mission Control said in a wake-up message to the astronauts.

NASA needs the extra electrical power that the new wings will provide in order to boost the amount of research being conducted at the space station. The pace of science work will pick up once the number of station crewmembers doubles to six; that's supposed to happen in two more months.