FollowTwo Russian cosmonauts ventured for about six hours outside the International Space Station (ISS) Thursday, August 22, morning and returned back safely to the station after installing a new telescope mount on the Zveda module of orbiting lab despite encountering equipment malfunction.
This was the second spacewalk of Fyodor Yurchikhin and Aleksandr Misurkin in less than a week after coming to know the base plate of the camera was not aligned properly.
ScienceRecorder.com website writes, “At first, Russia’s Mission Control told the cosmonauts to abort the installation of the telescope mount. Later, however, mission controllers determined that the misalignment problem, which might prevent the future telescope from pointing in the right direction, could be fixed after the mount was installed.”
With this the spacewalkers were given the go-ahead for the mission of replacing a laser communications experiment. The cosmonauts said working in that location was not easy.
Last month helmet of Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano was filled with water. Since then NASA has suspended all the pending US spacewalks until the outcome of investigation into this near-drowning incident.
At the end of the spacewalk the two Russian cosmonauts unfurled their Country’s flag in honor of Russia’s Flag Day. Yurchikhin said, “Today is a holiday, Russian Flag Day. We congratulate all Russians. We must love and respect our flag and then others will respect us.”
Apart from the two cosmonauts in the crew, two Americans, one Italian and one Russian were inside the ISS, watching the event. This was the 173rd spacewalk from the ISS.
