An American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut will venture outside the International Space Station today to set up a European experiment and conduct an extensive photographic survey of the exterior of the Russian side of the outpost.
Station skipper Mike Fincke and flight engineer Yury Lonchakov are slated to head outside the Russian Pirs airlock at noon for an excursion that is expected to last five-and-a-half to six hours.
You can watch the spacewalk live here in The Flame Trench. Simply click the NASA TV box on the righthand side of the page to launch our NASA TV viewer and live coverage. Be sure to refresh the page for periodic updates.
You can see all the details in this EVA Timeline.
Fincke and Lonchakov aim to install an experiment they were unable to activate during a spacewalk in December. The experiment since has been fixed and the two spacewalkers are going to make a second attempt to get it running. The experiment is a suitcase-sized container that is filled with samples of biological and organic samples that will be exposed to the space environment for several months.
The spacewalkers also will photograph the exterior of the Russian Zvezda Service Module, the Zarya module, the Pirs airlock and the rest of the Russian side of the station to document micrometeorite and space debris hits and see generally how the hardware has fared during up to a decade in orbit.
Fincke will be wearing a Russian Orlan spacesuit with red stripes. Lonchakov will be wearing an Orlan suit with blue stripes. It will the second career spacewalk for Lonchakov and the sixth for Fincke.
Space news and analysis from Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral 
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