MOSCOW, June 23. /TASS/. 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, according to a live broadcast by Russia’s state-run space corporation Roscosmos.

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.

Prokopyev and Petelin completed the 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.