Crew Performs Spacewalk

Spacewalking Expedition 25 Flight Engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Skripochka are floating briskly through the tasks planned for them outside the International Space Station. They began Russian Spacewalk #26 about 30 minutes later than scheduled but are about 30 minutes ahead of the timeline after installing a multipurpose workstation on the right side of the Zvezda service module for use by future spacewalkers. Their next task is to remove a robotics experiment from the left side of Zvezda.

Yurchikhin and Skripochka began their planned 5-hour, 55-minute spacewalk at 9:54 a.m. EST.

The primary assembly and maintenance objectives of the spacewalk are to install a multipurpose workstation on the starboard side of the Zvezda service module’s large-diameter section, clean thermal insulation around the vents for the Elektron oxygen-generation system and relocate a television camera from one end of the Rassvet docking compartment to the other.

Research objectives include cleaning and removing a robotics experiment known as Kontur, short for Development of a System of Supervisory Control Over the Internet of the Robotic Manipulator in the Russian Segment of ISS, from the port side of Zvezda into the Pirs airlock; installing a new materials experiment on a handrail on the Rassvet module, and collecting samples from the exterior of Zvezda and Pirs.