MOSCOW, August 10. /TASS/. Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, who is also a TASS special reporter in space, have completed their spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS), Roscosmos reported in a live broadcast on its website on Thursday.
The cosmonauts opened the exit hatch of the Poisk module aboard the ISS at 6:45 p.m. Moscow time on Wednesday and their spacewalk lasted for six hours 35 minutes. Initially, the cosmonauts were expected to spend six hours and 45 minutes in their extravehicular activity.
Prokopyev and Petelin mounted additional micrometeoroid protection shields on the Rassvet module in the spots vacated after the transfer of a heat exchanger and an airlock to the Nauka research lab. The cosmonauts also prepared a portable workplace on the Rassvet module designed for fixing the cosmonaut’s position and his movements.
With the help of the ERA robotic arm, Prokopyev was transferred in his workplace in test mode for the first time. His teammate Andrey Fedyayev controlled the process from aboard the orbital station.
This spacewalk was the eighth in the space career of Prokopyev, who worked outside the orbital station in spacesuit Orlan-ISS No. 5 with red stripes, and the sixth for Petelin, who wore spacesuit Orlan-ISS No. 4 with blue stripes.
Before their spacewalk, the Russian cosmonauts conducted preparatory work with the spacesuits. As the TASS special reporter in orbit informed on August 7, he checked together with Prokopyev the air tightness and parameters of the spacesuits.
The ISS Russian crew carried out their previous extravehicular activity on the evening of June 22. During their work outside the orbital outpost, they dismantled the old communications equipment from the Zvezda module and installed a new high-speed data transmission radio-technical system (RSPI-M). To date, they have carried out five spacewalks this year.