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Two Russian cosmonauts are taking a spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Wednesday (November 18) to prepare the orbiting lab for a new module, and you can watch their six-hour excursion live online.
Expedition 64 of Cmdr. Sergey Ryzhikov and flight engineer Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos – both early space explorers – will don their Russian Orlan spacesuits and exit the space station via the Poisk module at around 9:30 am EST (1430 GMT). ). Ryzhikov, designated EV1 (short for “extravehicular crewmember 1”), will wear a spacesuit with red stripes, while Kud-Sverchkov will have blue stripes like EV2.
NASA TV will provide live coverage of the spacewalk starting at 8:30 am EST (1330 GMT), or about an hour before the spacewalk begins, as NASA astronaut Kate Rubins helps cosmonauts don their suits. You can watch it live here, on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV, or directly via the agency’s website.
Related: The International Space Station: inside and out (infographic)
With this spacewalk, the two Sergeys will start working to prepare the International Space Station (ISS) for the arrival of the new Russian multipurpose laboratory module, also known as Nauka (“science” in Russian). The long-delayed science module was originally supposed to launch in 2007, and after more than a decade of delays, Roscosmos is gearing up to finally launch Nauka in 2021.
As this will be the first time anyone will use the Poisk module as an airlock for a space excursion, cosmonauts will first spend some time checking the hatch and inspecting it for leaks.
They will also take an antenna from the Pirs docking compartment and return it to the Poisk module, the first in a series of steps to get rid of Pirs altogether. Roscosmos plans to install Nauka where Pirs is now located, on the Zvezda service module of the Russian segment of the ISS.
It will take a series of spacewalks to deactivate the Pirs compartment, after which a Progress cargo spacecraft will take it away from the ISS. PIRs will be destroyed in the Earth’s atmosphere upon re-entry.
Other activities for today’s spacewalk include replacing a fluid flow regulator on the Zarya module, recovering hardware that measures space debris impacts, and adjusting an instrument that measures residuals from thruster hits, they said. in a statement by NASA officials.
Email Hanneke Weitering at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @hannekescience. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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