In the first of five ambitious spacewalks to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA astronauts managed to remove a 16-year-old camera on Thursday that had taken many of the telescope's most famous images.

NASA said astronauts John Grunsfeld and Drew Feustel stepped into space at 8:52 a.m. EDT and ended their spacewalk at 4:12 p.m. They removed and replaced the telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Through this, Hubble will be allowed to capture a wider range of images from ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths.

Spacewalk No. 2 was scheduled to begin at 8:16 a.m. EDT Friday, but it will be preceded by an unscheduled re-inspection of approximately 40 heat shield tiles that might have been damaged during Monday's launch of space shuttle Atlantis.

Watch a clip of the Astronauts as they work to repair the Hubble telescope in space: