Astronauts set spacewalk record

In what was billed Nasa's longest spacewalk, two astronauts have re-arranged the outside of the International Space Station to make room for an Italian cargo carrier.

The excursion by shuttle crew members Jim Voss and Susan Helms was four minutes short of nine hours and entailed slow, deliberate work with cables and connectors - "a jungle of wires" as Voss called it.

The spacewalkers were "right on the edge" of what they could handle, but performed admirably despite some initial butterfingers which put them an hour behind, Nasa lead flight director John Shannon said.

He added: "We knew this one was going to be tough."

A plastic bag containing a hydrazine-detection kit floated out space shuttle Discovery's hatch as the spacewalk got under way, but Voss managed to catch the bag.

Minutes later, Voss accidentally let go of a vice-like device needed for a work platform. The 10-15lb piece of metal, about the size of a thick dictionary, drifted away and joined the thousands of pieces of junk orbiting Earth.

Because the part was considered critical, Nasa had a spare on board.

The main event was the relocation of a docking port on space station Alpha.

The bulky cone had to be moved from one side of a module to another so the shuttle crew could plug the Italian-made cargo carrier into the vacated spot.

The reusable £100m module, named Leonardo after Leonardo da Vinci, was packed with five tons of gear and ferried to the space station aboard Discovery.