Houston ? A pair of spacewalking astronauts wired the international space station’s newest room on Saturday, crossing the last major task off their to-do list before the next shuttle mission next month.

Commander Peggy Whitson and Daniel Tani hooked up more electrical and fluid connections linking the space station and the Harmony compartment that was delivered by the shuttle Discovery last month.

Harmony will serve as a docking port for a new European laboratory named Columbus. The shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to deliver the lab in two weeks. A Japanese lab set to be delivered early next year also will dock to the school bus-sized module.

Flight controllers on the ground were checking all of Harmony’s systems Saturday to make sure the module would be ready to accommodate the new lab.

Flight director Derek Hassmann said Harmony’s cooling and power systems were up and running, as were its computers. He said it is an “amazing accomplishment” that the station crew got all their work done so quickly with no major mechanical hiccups.

“It’s become routine, but it’s not nearly as easy as this crew and this team make it look,” Hassmann said.

Much of Saturday’s work involved lugging a second 18 1/2-foot, 300-pound tray holding fluid lines to Harmony and bolting it down. The lines carry ammonia, a coolant.

Tani also spent about an hour inspecting a jammed joint that is needed to turn one of the space station’s two sets of huge solar wings.

The gear has been experiencing electrical current spikes and must be repaired over the coming months to continue station construction.

Last month, Tani found steel shavings inside the joint while spacewalking during Discovery’s visit. He found similar debris on Saturday.

Guided by an engineer on the ground, Tani and Whitson took digital pictures of the joint’s inner workings and described the debris and damage.

Most of the shavings were concentrated in one area, Tani said.

The space station’s three residents have been working almost nonstop since Discovery’s departure on Nov. 5. This was their third spacewalk and the last planned before Atlantis arrives, which is scheduled to blast off on Dec. 6.