Spacewalker Danny Olivas is attached to Atlantis' robot arm as he works to repair a displaced thermal blanket on the shuttle's left orbital maneuvering system pod, June 15, 2007. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo) Photo Gallery>>>

    WASHINGTON, June 15 (Xinhua) -- While Russian and U.S. flight engineers are trying to fix the failed computer system on International Space Station (ISS), two astronauts finished the third spacewalk on Friday, accomplishing multi-task.

    Mission Specialists James Reilly and John Olivas started the spacewalk at 1:24 p.m. EDT (1724 GMT), and they were back inside the Quest airlock at 9:22 p.m. EDT (0122 GMT).

    Three major tasks are accomplished during the nearly-eight-hour excursion, including repair work on Space Shuttle Atlantis.

    The two astronauts tackled separate jobs at the beginning. Olivas focused on the repair of a thermal blanket that is out of position on space shuttle Atlantis. Working from the end of the Atlantis' robot arm, he successfully tucked the blanket back into place and then used a medical stapler to secure it to adjacent blankets on Atlantis' left orbital maneuvering system pod.

    Meanwhile, Reilly installed a hydrogen vent on the station's Destiny Laboratory. The vent is for a new oxygen generation system.

    During the second half of the spacewalk, the duo went to the top of the station's Port 6 truss to assist in the retraction of a solar array. Over a two-day period the crew has already folded about half of the array bays.

    Finally, the two spacewalkers, with the crew inside the ISS, completed the retraction of the outpost's old, starboard-reaching solar array, which is latched inside its storage boxes.

    This afternoon, the crew inside the station also made some progress in troubleshooting the failed Russian computers. They powered up two lanes of the Russian Central Computer and two lanes of the Terminal Computer by using a jumper cable to bypass a faulty secondary power swith. The current plan is to allow the computers to operate overnight and analyze the data Saturday morning.

    Earlier in the day, NASA's ISS program manager Mike Suffredini said at a status briefing that Russian and U.S. experts are focusing on efforts for recovering the computers and options to maintain attitude control until the problem is resolved.

    Russian space officials said Friday that the launch of the next Progress ship, scheduled for Aug. 6, could be moved forward to July 23 so the station can get the new parts or new computers as soon as possible.

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