Coming Up Live: Spacewalk On Tap At ISS

An American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut will venture outside the International Space Station tonight on an excursion aimed at setting up and retrieving science experiments outside the outpost.

Station skipper Mike Fincke and flight engineer Yuri Lonchakov will don Russian Orlan suits and then float out the hatch of the Pirs airlock around 7:15 p.m. EST for what is expected to be a six-hour, 10-minute spacewalk. Fincke will be wearing a suit with red stripes; Lonchakov will wear a suit with blue stripes and flight engineer Sandra Magnus will remain inside the station during the excursion.

You can watch all the action unfold live here in The Flame Trench starting at 6:30 p.m. EST. Simply click the NASA TV box on the righthand side of this page to launch our NASA TV viewer and live coverage of the spacewalk. And be sure to refresh the page for periodic updates.

The first order of business for Fincke and Lonchakov will be to install a special probe designed to measure electromagnetic potential oustide the Russian segment of the station. Russian engineers suspect it might be contributing to the failure of explosive bolts designed to separate sections of Soyuz spacecraft just before atmospheric reentry.

Here's a graphic that shows where the probe will be mounted on the outside of the airlock:














And here is a close-up of the probe:

Bolts failures led to back-to-back ballistic reentries in October 2007 and April 2008 -- steeper than normal trajectories that subjected crews to forces eight or nine times greater than normal gravity.

The ballistic reentries also propelled both Soyuz craft and their returning crews to landings that were hundreds of miles off course.

The spacewalkers also will install two science experiments on a platform on the hull of the Russian Zvezda module, a command-and-control segment that doubles as crew quarters on the Russian side of the outpost.

Another suitcase-sized experiment packages will be retrieved for a return to Earth.

You can read more about the spacewalk and the objectives of the current tour of duty on the station here in this Expedition 18 Press Kit.

Click the hyperlink to download your own copy.