Two American astronauts, Sunita Williams and Michael Lopez-Alegria on board the International Space Station have begun the first of three testing spacewalks that will take place over the next nine days.
Sunita Williams and Michael Lopez-Alegria are attaching a laboratory module to a new cooling system, recently delivered by shuttle to the ISS. The Russian Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin is staying inside the station as backup.Williams is set to become the top female Amercian spacewalker in history in the course of the next month. The overall record of 16 spacewalks is held by the Russian cosmonaut Anatoliy Solovyov.