Russian cosmonauts wrap up 6.5-hour spacewalk

Russian cosmonauts Sergei Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin completed their spacewalk on Thursday, which lasted more than six hours.

The cosmonauts performed several tasks outside the International Space Station (ISS), including mounting additional micrometeoroid protection screens on the Rassvet module, where some equipment had been relocated to the new multipurpose laboratory module Nauka.

They also installed a portable workstation on the European Robotic Arm and tested the transport of a cosmonaut on the workstation while their colleague Andrey Fedyaev operated the arm from the inside.

Prokopyev and Petelin entered the open space at 17:45 Moscow time (1445 GMT) on Wednesday and returned to the ISS at 00:20 Moscow time (2120 GMT Wednesday) on Thursday. They finished their spacewalk tasks faster than initially planned and spent six hours and 35 minutes in outer space.

Before re-entering the ISS, Prokopyev and Petelin disposed of two bundles of waste by pushing them away from the station. Prokopyev calculated the trajectories to minimize the risk for the station. The bundles are expected to burn in the atmosphere in the next few days.

This was the eighth spacewalk for Prokopyev and the sixth for Petelin.

The previous spacewalk under the Russian program occurred on June 22, when the cosmonauts replaced some old communication equipment on the Zvezda module with new high-speed radio-technical information transmission equipment.