Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, who is
also a TASS correspondent aboard the International Space Station
(ISS), completed their extravehicular activity shortly before
midnight on Thursday, Azernews reports, citing TASS.
The cosmonauts began the spacewalk by opening hatches of the
Poisk module at 5:24 p.m. on Thursday. The cosmonauts coped with
their tasks quicker than planned, spending six hours and 23 minutes
in outer space.
During the endeavor, the cosmonauts installed a new high-speed
radio transmission device (RSPI-M) on the outer surface of the
Zvezda module. They also dismantled several pieces of scientific
equipment from the station’s outer shell, taking some of them with
them and jettisoning others from the station.
This was the seventh spacewalk in the career of Sergey
Prokopyev, who was wearing an Orlan-MKS space suit with red
stripes, and the fifth for Dmitry Petelin, whose Orlan-MKS suit had
blue stripes.
mission ahead of schedule even though some of the devices were
particularly hard to dismantle. “It looks like someone did a really
good job when installing them,” Prokopyev said jokingly when his
first attempt to disconnect certain pieces of equipment from the
station failed.As the cosmonauts moved along the outer shell of the Zvezda
module, they were surprised by how dirty it was. “It looks like a
soiled saucepan,” Prokopyev said.
Before re-entering the space station, Dmitry Petelin used a
special device to clean the outer surface of a window in the Zvezda
module.
The previous spacewalks under the Russian program took place in
the early morning hours of April 19, the night of May 4 and the
evening of May 12. During the three spacewalks, the airlock and the
heat exchanger were transferred to the multipurpose laboratory
module Nauka and installed.
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