Power restored in space repairs

FOR the second straight day, astronauts stepped out on a space walk yesterday to bring a scientific instrument back from the dead on the Hubble Space Telescope.

This time, the work involved removing 117 screws, all but six of them tiny enough to slip through the fingers. It was expected to be much harder for spacewalker Michael Massimino because of his bulky gloves.

Massimino and Michael Good ventured out as space shuttle Atlantis sailed 560km above Australia. They began working on the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, disabled by a power failure five years ago.