MOSCOW, August 16 (RIA Novosti) – Two Russian crew members on board the International Space Station (ISS) will carry out a spacewalk on Friday to install equipment for the arrival of a new Russian module, Russia’s Mission Control Center said.
Flight Engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin are expected to open the Pirs airlock hatches at 06.40 pm Moscow time [14:40 GMT] and will return to the ISS at 01:19 am Moscow time on August 17 [21:19 GMT Friday], a Mission Control spokesman said Thursday.
The two cosmonauts will continue routing power and Ethernet cables for the future arrival of the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM), which will be launched aboard a Proton-M rocket from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan later this year.
They will also install a new panel of Vynoslovost (Endurance) experiments designed to collect data on the effects of the microgravity environment in low-Earth orbit.
The six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk will be the seventh in Yurchikhin’s career and the second for Misurkin. Both cosmonauts conducted a similar spacewalk on June 24.
The spacewalk on Friday will be the 172nd in support of assembly and maintenance performed on the $100-billion orbiting laboratory built by 15 countries.
