Live Russian spacewalk, streaming now: Watch it here
Two Russian astronauts donned spacesuits Friday morning and climbed outside of the International Space Station to conduct a little space station maintenance.
NASA is streaming the spacewalk live, and you can watch it live, right here.
The two cosmonauts, Roman Romanenko, 41, and Pavel Viogradav, 59, opened the hatch of the ISS at 7:03 a.m. PDT Friday, and their spacewalk is estimated to last a total of six hours.
By venturing on this spacewalk, Viogradav becomes the oldest person to make a spacewalk, the Associated Press reports.
Romanenko is a second-generation spacewalker. His father Yuri Romanenko made spacewalks in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
This is Romanenko’s first spacewalk.
So far, the spacewalk is going well. Commentators on the NASA live stream said that as 10:45 a.m. PDT, the astronauts were running a few minutes ahead of schedule.
The spacewalkers’ first job is to install a new experiment called Obstanovka on the space station that will study plasma waves and the effect of space weather on the Earth’s ionosphere, according to a NASA release.
While they are out there, they will also retrieve the Biorisk experiment, which studied the effects of microbes on spacecraft structures.
And they will fix a broken retro-reflector device that will help the next cargo ship navigate when it docks with the station in June.
Some of the video on the live stream is provided by a helmet camera on Romanenko’s spacesuit. Other video comes from a camera mounted on the space station.
