Two cosmonauts this morning are getting ready to step outside the International Space Station for a spacewalk performing maintenance on the Russian segment and swapping research experiments. Veteran Fyodor Yurchikhin and rookie Oleg Skripochka are scheduled to exit an Earth-facing airlock on the Pirs docking compartment at 9:25 a.m. Live NASA TV coverage starts at 9 a.m. -- click the NASA TV box at right to watch.
Four other station residents, including American astronauts Scott Kelly, Shannon Walker and Doug Wheelock, will be stationed inside two Soyuz lifeboats during the spacewalk, ready to evacuate the station in an emergency. The spacewalk will be the fifth for Yurchikhin, whose Orlan spacesuit will be marked with red stripes. It's the first for Skripochka, whose suit has blue stripes.
The pair plan to install a workstation on the Zvezda service module, clean insulation around oxygen-generation system vents and relocate a television camera.
They'll also remove a robotics experiment and install a new materials experiment.
The spacewalk is scheduled to last just under six hours.
3 comments:
With the two Russian astronauts on a space walk, why are the other four in the emergency lifeboats "in case of an emergency"? Is this standard procedure?
HBJ -- this was described as a standard procedure during Russian EVAs because access to the Soyuz spacecraft is limited in the event of a major failure or emergency. However, it turns out access is only limited to one of the ships. Wheelock and Walker have been going about their daily work in the U.S. segment, while Kelly and Kaleri have been inside their Soyuz.
Mr. Dean...Thanks for the feedback. Seems an awkward situation. Perhaps the final station configuration, if they aren't there yet, will preclude this problem in the future...
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