Russian space agency Roscosmos announced that Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petilin walked in space for more than six and a half hours today, Thursday.
Astronauts have performed many tasks around the International Space Station (ISS), including installing meteor shower walls on the space station’s Raszvet (Dawn) module. At the same time, some equipment was moved from the outer wall of the same unit to the new multi-purpose laboratory unit, Nauka (Science).
In addition, they installed a workstation for the European robotic arm and tested its operation while their colleague, Andrei Fegiyev, operated the arm from the inside.
Prokopjev and Betelin left space at 15:45 Hungarian time on Wednesday and returned to the International Space Station six hours and 35 minutes later. They completed their tasks faster than originally planned.
Before returning to the International Space Station, Prokopjev and Betelin removed two packages of trash from the station. Prokopyev calculated its trajectory to minimize the risk to the station. The waste is expected to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere in the coming days.
This was Prokopyev’s eighth flight and Petelin’s sixth in space.
The previous spacewalk of the Russian space program took place on June 22, when cosmonauts replaced outdated communication equipment in the Zvezda (star) module with new high-speed wireless technical information transmission equipment.
The featured image is illustrative.
