Astronauts repair space station with help of toothbrush

Spacewalking astronauts triumphed over a stubborn bolt and installed a critical power-switching box at the International Space Station this week, reviving electrical systems.

"Looks like you fixed the station," mission control at Nasa's Johnson Space Centre in Houston told the crew on the radio.

The problem had cut the amount of electrical power available to the orbiting lab and a variety of equipment had to be turned off.

Engineers on the ground and the astronauts in orbit scrambled over the weekend to devise makeshift tools to clean metal shavings from the socket of the troublesome bolt after last week's failed effort to plug in the new power-relay unit.

This time, NASA's Sunita Williams and Japan's Akihiko Hoshide, part of NASA's Expedition 32 mission to the ISS, were armed with a blue toothbrush, a wire brush and other jury-rigged tools.

The two applied grease to the sticky bolt as well as extra pressure and plain old jiggling. They also brushed and blew away most if not all the metal shavings, debris that was discovered during last Thursday's eight-hour repair session, one of the longest spacewalks on record.

Wednesday's outing lasted 6 1/2 hours.

Although the space station remained stable, NASA was in a hurry to get the problem fixed because of the impending departure of Joseph Acaba, the U.S. astronaut who operated the hefty robot arm from inside. Acaba is due to return to Earth in 1 1/2 weeks.

Altogether, the space station has four of these power-switching units, which relay electricity from the eight solar wings. Being down one unit meant the orbiting complex could draw power from only six of those wings.

The power store was further degraded over the weekend when, in an unrelated problem, a tripped circuit breaker prevented full access to yet another solar panel. That left the space station running on just five wings, a vulnerable situation.

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Astronauts repair space station with help of toothbrush