Station commander Gennady Padalka and flight engineer Michael Barratt are slated to exit the Russian Pirs airlock at 2:45 a.m. for an excursion expected to last 5.5 hours.
The job at hand: Rigging up docking system antennas that will be used to automatically berth the Russian Mini Research Module 2 after it is launched to the station in November.
The 8,800-pound module is nearly identical to the station's keg-shaped Pirs -- or "peer" -- docking compartment, which doubles as an airlock. The Mini Research Module will be berthed to a zenith port at the forward end of the Russian Zvezda Service Module.
You can watch the action live here in The Flame Trench starting at 2:15 a.m. Friday. Simply click the NASA TV box on the righthand side of this page to launch our NASA TV viewer, and be sure to refresh this page for periodic updates.
The 5.5-hour outing is slated to begin at 2:45 a.m. Click here to see the Detailed Timeline for the spacewalk.
Padalka, the lead spacewalker, will be answering to the radio call sign EV-1 and wearing a Russian Orlan MK spacesuit with red stripes. Barratt will be EV-2 and wear an Orlan MK with blue stripes. Orlan means "Sea Eagle" in Russian. The Orlan MK is a new version making its debut. It is equipped with a new electronic control display panel designed to give spacewalkers more insight into the health of spacesuit systems.
Padalka and Barratt plan to pick up two antenna packs and then put them in place on the outside of the hull of the forward end of the Russian Zvezda -- or "Star" -- Service module.
The antennas will enable the Mini Research Module to guide itself in to its Service Module docking port. Like Pirs, it will serve as a berthing port for Soyuz crew transport ships and robotic Progress cargo carriers.
Padalka and Barratt also will be stringing electrical cables that connect the antennas with the Ukrainian-built KURS automatic docking system control station inside the station.
Toward the end of the excursion, Barratt, with a camera in hand, will anchor himself to the end of the telescoping Strela boom outside the Pirs module to document the position and condition of the antennas and cabling.
The two spacewalkers will return to the Pirs airlock after Russian Mission Control outside Moscow verifies to antennas are working properly.
The spacewalk will be the first performed since the size of the station crew was expanded to six. The four resident crew members will be separated to make certain all could board a three-person Soyuz lifeboat in an emergency.
Newly arrived Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, European astronaut Frank De Winne and Canadian Robert Thirsk all will remain on the U.S. Destiny laboratory, where they could quickly move into a Soyuz docked at an Earth-facing port on the station's Russian Zarya -- or "Dawn" module.
Launched in November 1998, Zarya was the first segment of the station and provided a foundation for the U.S. Unity Module to link to in December 1998.
Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, crewmates with Padalka and Barratt since his launch on shuttle Discovery in late March, will remain in the Russian Service Module. A Soyuz lifeboat is parked at its aft end.
The spacewalk will be the first of two that will be staged at the station over the next week. Padalka and Barratt will do an internal spacewalk at the forward end of the Service Module next Wednesday. Working in vacuum, they plan to install a docking cone that will enable the Mini Research Module to dock at the zenith port of Service Module.
The spacewalk early Friday will be the seventh for Padalka and the first for Barratt. It will be the 124th since Zarya and Unity were linked in low Earth orbit in 1998. Station construction workers from the U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada, Germany, France and Sweden so far have logged 775 hours and 14 minutes of spacewalking assembly and maintenance work at the outpost.
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