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Russian ISS crewmembers to conduct maintenance spacewalk

They will have to replace a panel of a liquid flow regulator at the Zarya cargo block

MOSCOW, June 24 (Itar-Tass) - Two International Space Station crew members - Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin - will make this year’s second spacewalk under the programme of the ISS Russian segment.

“Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin should open the exit hatch on the Pirs docking module and start conducting the spacewalk at 18:35 Moscow time. They will float outside the station for over 6 hours,” the Mission Control Centre outside Moscow told Itar-Tass.

Both cosmonauts will wear Orlan-MK computerized space suits with LCD displays that will direct what systems and in what sequence should be controlled before the spacewalk’s start and what to do in an emergency situation.

This will be Misurkin’s first spacewalk, while Yurchikhin has already made five spacewalks lasting a total of 31 hour and 54 minutes.

They will have to replace a panel of a liquid flow regulator at the Zarya cargo block, to install scientific equipment at the mini-research module Poisk, to dismantle a panel of space experiment Vynoslovost (Endurance) and to remove Foton-Gamma equipment from a multipurpose workstation of the service module Zvezda.

Other members of the crew - Pavel Vinogradov of Russia and NASA astronauts Karen Nyberg and Christopher Cassidy and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency - will safeguard spacewalkers.