The three-man crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) will do a little housekeeping during a spacewalk next week to make way for future expansion of the laboratory.

On July 23, Expedition 15 crewmember Clayton Anderson will journey outside of the space station to throw two large hunks of unneeded equipment towards Earth, officials said during a press conference today at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

"This is the first time we've ever done a jettison quite like this on the space station," said Bob Dempsey, NASA's lead flight director for Expedition 15, adding that smaller jettisons have been performed on past ISS and Hubble Space Telescope missions.

During the upcoming spacewalk, Anderson will jettison a 1,400-pound (635-kilograms) refrigerator-sized container of ammonia, or Early Ammonia Servicer (EAS), away from the station at a gentle pace of one mile per hour (1.6 kph). He'll also toss a 212-pound (96-kilogram) stanchion used to attach a camera to the space laboratory toward the Earth.

Dempsey explained that discarding the equipment during an extravehicular activity (EVA), rather than shipping it back to Earth via a NASA shuttle, was the best choice because of time and space constraints.

"It's not a decision that's made lightly. Besides the fact that it might have some use in the future, it provides space debris that could later impact the space station," Dempsey said. He noted that moving the equipment around will be necessary to make room for additions and repairs to the ISS during future shuttle missions.

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