MOSCOW, June 22. /TASS/. Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, who is also a TASS correspondent aboard the International Space Station (ISS), finished installing a new high-speed radio transmission device (RSPI-M) on the outer surface of the Zvezda module on Thursday evening.

Before fixing the device into place, Prokopyev and Petelin removed the old communications system and equipment installed as part of the Seismoproject experiment in 2013.

In order to safely remove these pieces of equipment, the cosmonauts had to reposition a solar panel installed on Zvezda. After the old devices were disconnected, the cosmonauts jettisoned them from the ISS for safety reasons.

In addition, the cosmonauts removed some equipment installed as part of the Impact experiment to study emissions produced by the engine of the Russian ISS segment. They also recovered a removable container with samples of different materials that spent 19 years in space attached to the station’s outer shell.

According to a spokesperson for NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston, Prokopyev and Petelin are about an hour ahead of schedule. They still have to take pictures of the Zvezda module and dismantle one of the three containers of the Biorisk-MSN experiment before re-entering the space station’s Poisk module.

This is the seventh spacewalk in the career of Sergey Prokopyev, who is wearing an Orlan-MKS space suit with red stripes, and the fifth for Dmitry Petelin, whose Orlan-MKS suit has blue stripes.

Hatches of the Poisk module were opened at 5:24 p.m.. Thursday’s spacewalk, the fourth conducted this year as part of Russia’s space program, is expected to take 6 hours and 51 minutes.