Cosmonauts Set For Spacewalk Wednesday

Two Russian cosmonauts will venture outside the International Space Station this week on an excursion aimed at moving a cargo boom and performing other work outside the outpost.

Station flight engineers Sergei Volkov and Alexander Samokutyaev will exit the Pirs airlock around 10 a.m. Wednesday and then deploy a small satellite equipped with an amateur radio transmitter and a student-built experiment. During the planned six-hour spacewalk, the cosmonauts also will install laser communications equipment and replace experiments on the Zvezda service module. In addition, they will retrieve a rendezvous antenna.

You can watch live NASA TV coverage of the spacewalk live here in The Flame Trench beginning at 10 a.m. Wednesday. Click the NASA TV box to launch our NASA TV viewer and refresh the page for periodic updates.

The spacewalk will be the third for Volkov and the first for Samokutyaev.