Astronauts Take Long Spacewalk

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. —  In what’s being billed as NASA’s longest spacewalk, two astronauts rearranged the international space station on Sunday to make room for an Italian cargo carrier.

The module, called Leonardo, was raised from space shuttle Discovery’s payload bay late Sunday night, hours after the spacewalk. It was slowly hoisted by the robot arm toward the space station.

The excursion by crew members Jim Voss and Susan Helms was just four minutes shy of nine hours and entailed slow, deliberate work with cables and connectors.

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 cargo carrier into the vacated spot late Sunday night.