Two Russian cosmonauts spent six hours outside the International Space Station on Thursday (June 22) cleansing up the outside of the orbiting laboratory by removing and tossing overboard a trio of now not needed devices, including a spent science experiment.
Expedition 69 commander Sergey Prokopyev and flight engineer Dmitry Petelin, each of Russia’s federal space corporation Roscosmos, exited the space station’s Poisk module at 10:24 a.m. EDT (1424 GMT) on Thursday.
Along with jettisoning hardware, the spacewalk also included the installation of a brand new stanchion for high-speed telemetry equipment and the retrieval of a micrometeoroid impact experiment that had been mounted outside the space station for quite a few years.
Prokopyev and Petelin made quick work of rerouting cables and disconnecting a knowledge relay unit and a telemetry transmitter, in addition to the hardware for a accomplished experiment that measured seismic activity on Earth, before throwing each overboard for his or her eventual disposal, burning up in Earth’s atmosphere.
“Wave goodbye to it,” advised Mission Control Moscow, as Prokopyev prepared to toss certainly one of the items into space. “Rest in peace.”
The experiment, called the Seismoprognoz, had been installed outside the Zvezda service module during an Expedition 38 spacewalk on Dec. 27, 2013, almost 10 years ago. Just like the communication units, the Seismoprognoz was tossed off the back of the space station in a direction that ensured that the gear could never make recontact with the outpost.
The jettisons, which also included the stanchions (or “monoblocks”) that had held the equipment on Zvezda, made way for the installation of recent hardware, including a mono block for a brand new high-speed data unit that Prokopyev and Petelin mounted on the module.
The 2 spacewalkers also photo documented the condition of the plume deflectors on the aft end of Zvezda service module for later evaluation by Russian engineers on the bottom. The deflectors shield the station from the plume of the module’s engines. The inspection comes almost 23 years after Zvezda was launched atop a Russian Proton rocket in July 2000.
“It looks like a grimy frying pan,” said Prokopyev. “That might have made some good fries in it.”
“Well, it hasn’t been washed for quite a while,” replied Petelin.
The cosmonauts also captured high-resolution photography of the boom upon which a high-data antenna is mounted on the very aft end of the Zvezda service module.
The duo then moved to the other side of Zvezda to complete out their tasks for this spacewalk. They cleaned certainly one of the module’s windows using towels that they then also jettisoned and retrieved a final science experiment, a biological sample exposure package, situated near the hatch to the Poisk airlock.
The spacewalk ended at 4:48 p.m. EDT (2048 GMT) with Prokopyev and Petelin back inside Poisk after working for six hours and 24 minutes within the vacuum of space.
With the completion of Thursday’s spacewalk, Prokopyev has now logged 48 hours and 40 minutes on seven extravehicular activities (EVAs). Petelin has now conducted five spacewalks, all with Prokopyev, for a complete time of 33 hours and 9 minutes.
The EVA was the was the ninth this 12 months and the 266th dedicated to the assembly and maintenance of the International Space Station since 1998.