Christmas Eve Spacewalk for Repair Job A Success (+video)

While many people spent Christmas Eve doing last-minute shopping, two American astronauts had a more challenging matter to attend to Tuesday.

In orbit more than 200 miles above Earth, flight engineers Rick Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins embarked on a spacewalk Tuesday morning to repair part of the International Space Station’s cooling system.

The spacewalk ended at 2:23 p.m. ET Tuesday and lasted 7 hours and 30 minutes, NASA said.

More than four hours into the job, the two astronauts had successfully bolted a replacement ammonia pump module into its location and were working to connect lines to allow the ammonia to flow, NASA said in a tweet.

There was a slight kink in the work when one of the fluid lines tangled. The astronauts untangled it, but when they did, the line released some ammonia flakes that landed on their space suits.

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