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Two Russians complete six-hour spacewalk

However they ran out of time before they could beef up the orbiting lab's armor against space junk

KOROLYOV, February 17 (Itar-Tass) —— Two Russian members of the ISS crew completed an over six-hour spacewalk overnight, the mission control center said.

Anton Shkaplerov and Oleg Kononenko fulfilled the main goal of the first spacewalk this year and moved a bulky zero-gravity crane to a new home on the International Space Station.

However they ran out of time before they could beef up the orbiting lab's armor against space junk.

The space construction crane, called Strela, was moved from the Pirs docking port on the bottom of the space station to a rooftop module called Poisk.

The spacewalkers had planned to install new metal shields on the station's Russian segment to protect it against damage from micrometeorites and space junk. But the crane relocation work ran long and they had to skip the shield installation task.