MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Russian-U.S. crew of the Mir space station began on Thursday the last stage of a rewiring job on solar power panels that began with a sortie into the airless Spektr module on Monday, a Mission Control spokeswoman said. Cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyov and Pavel Vinogradov rested for two days after nearly seven energy-sapping hours in spacesuits inside the damaged module. They only partly succeeded in connecting cables from its solar panels to the main station. The spokeswoman said they would start a final stage of wiring the batteries up to a computer guidance system on Mir's Kristall module and to the main power system to see if their attempts to improve the panels' efficiency had worked. A near-fatal collision with a cargo vessel on June 25 punctured Spektr's hull, smashed one of its four large solar batteries and forced the crew to sever connections to the three remaining panels, which are a major source of power for Mir. An earlier sortie by Solovyov and Vinogradov on August 22 reconnected the three to the station's power system, resolving the worst of its energy shortage. An external spacewalk on September 6 helped line the panels up better to the sun. But a computer guidance system in Spektr that should let the batteries track the sun's rays for maximum efficiency is not working. On Monday, the Russian pair disconnected the panels from it and fed cables instead towards the main station, where they were to be linked to the Kristall guidance computer on Thursday. In fact, the cosmonauts were able to connect completely only two of the three panels, one large, one small, with the main module. They ran out of time in a finicky operation to connect the third. Solovyov said ground crew had sent the wrong spanner. The two cosmonauts are also due to make the first of two spacewalks outside Mir to locate and try to repair the Spektr puncture towards the end of this month or early next month, the spokeswoman said. As during the sortie into Spektr, NASA researcher David Wolf will man the station's Soyuz escape craft during the spacewalk.