A spacewalk by Cmdr Anatoly Solovyov and the NASA astronaut, Dr Michael Foale, to inspect the Mir orbital station's damaged Spektr module has been postponed until next Friday or Saturday, mission control said yesterday.
The spacewalk had been set tentatively for next Wednesday, but a mission control spokesman said yesterday the Mir crew would not finish all the preliminary work by then for the spacewalk.
Cmdr Solovyov had asked mission control "not to rush or get over-anxious" during preparations for the spacewalk, in which he and Dr Foale will try to find a tiny puncture in the hull of the Spektr science module, which was rammed by an unmanned cargo craft on June 25th.
During a difficult internal spacewalk a week ago, Cmdr Solovyov and the third crew member, Flight Engineer Pavel Vinogradov, reconnected three of Spektr's solar panels, restoring power that was lost when the previous crew had to seal off the module after the collision. Spektr's fourth solar panel was irreparably damaged in the collision, which also depressurised the module.
During their spacewalk, Cmdr Solovyov and Flight Engineer Vinogradov failed to locate the puncture in Spektr's hull, which will have to be patched up for the module to be repressurised and brought back into operation.
Russian space officials have said the hole is only about the size of a sugar cube, and according to Mr Valery Ryumin, Russian coordinator of the Mir-NASA joint programme, the crew might have to dismantle the damaged solar panel to get at it during the external spacewalk.
For a while yesterday, the Mir space station's main oxygen generator was lost in space. The old crew put the Mir's newer Elektron oxygen system aside earlier this month shortly before they returned to Earth so they could temporarily set up a back-up system.
Yet when the new crew was ready to repair the main metre-long Elektron yesterday, they did not see it anywhere on the orbiting station, space officials said. "They just can't find it and they have looked everywhere," a spokesman said.
A Mission Control official had to phone Mir's former commander, Mr Vasily Tsibliyev, to ask him to account for his housekeeping. "They had to call Tsibliyev, who explained roughly where it was located, and finally they found it," another official said.