Two cosmonauts are getting ready to venture outside the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday night for some orbital maintenance work.
Update: April 19, 12:25 p.m. ET: The cosmonauts completed a seven-hour and 55-minute spacewalk at 5:35 a.m. ET on Wednesday, successfully installing a radiator on the Nauka science module.
Original post:
Commander Sergey Prokopyev and Flight Engineer Dmitri Petelin are scheduled to perform their spacewalk at 9:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday to move a radiator from one side of the ISS to the other. The extravehicular activity will be broadcast live on NASA TV, as well as the space agency’s website. You can also tune into the action through the feed below. The live feed will begin at 9:00 p.m. ET.
The spacewalk is set to last for around six hours and 40 minutes. Cosmonauts Prokopyev and Petelin will be tasked with moving a radiator, or heat exchanger, from the space station’s Rassvet module to the Nauka science module.
The newly installed European robotic arm will assist with the task, with Roscosmos Flight Engineer Andrey Fedyaev commanding it from the space station interior. The pair will don their Orlan spacesuits, exiting through the Poisk airlock and making their way over to the Earth-facing side of the ISS.
This is the cosmonauts’ second spacewalk together. In November 2022, Prokopyev and Petelin were unable to go on a spacewalk to relocate the radiator due to a spacesuit malfunction. Prokopyev’s spacesuit had faulty pumps connected to its cooling system, rendering it unusable for an extravehicular activity. Hopefully the pair have better luck with their spacesuits this time around.
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