6 Hours Long Spacewalk by Russian Cosmonauts to Check Spacecraft Soyuz

Two Russian cosmonauts living and working on the International Space Station have ventured outside the station for a spacewalk that is expected to last for six hours. The spacewalk is arranged in order to check a hole in the external hull of the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft, which is currently docked at the International Space Station (ISS). Oleg Kononenko and Sergey Prokopyev of the Roscosmos, Russian space agency have begun their spacewalk at 11 am EST. 

In August this year, a pressure leak was identified on the space station that was later traced to the Soyuz. Though within few hours after locating the source of the leak, the Expedition 56 crew sealed the hole and since then the station is maintaining a steady pressure.

During the spacewalk, the cosmonauts will also take samples of any residue found on the hull. They will also take digital images of the area before placing a new thermal blanket over it, as part of the repairing mechanism. The samples and photographs are going to provide enough evidence, which will help in the investigation about the cause of the pressure leak, as informed by NASA. 

The spacewalk was initially planned for November 15 this year and Prokopyev was set to perform it along with Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin. However, Alexey Ovchinin couldn’t able to make it to the ISS, because of the failure of the Soyuz-FG booster, which was carrying the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft with Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague on board in the month of October.

After the spacewalk, Russian cosmonaut Prokopyev along with NASA astronaut Serena Aunon-Chancellor, and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Alexander Gerst will return from the space station to Earth on December 19. The three will return home after more than six months on the mission.

Earlier Russian Artemyev and Prokopyev have manually launched four small technology satellites, retrieve material science samples from the hull of the Zvezda service module and install an experiment called Icarus on the Russian part of the space station. Icarus is a collaborative environmental experiment between Germany and Russia, which studies the migratory patterns of small animals on the Earth.

The spacewalk by the Russian cosmonauts is going to be the 212 spacewalk so far, which is done time to time in support of the maintenance, station assembly and upgrades. Meanwhile, this is the fourth spacewalk in Kononenko’s career, while Prokopyev is having his second spacewalk.