Two cosmonauts are about to go on a second spacewalk in a little over a week to configure a radiator on the International Space Station (ISS) that helps them stay cool on board the orbital lab.
Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin are scheduled to exit the space station at 11:55 a.m. ET on Friday. The spacewalk will be broadcast live on NASA TV, as well as the space agency’s website. You can also tune into the action through the feed below. The live coverage will begin at 11:30 a.m. ET.
The Mission
The two cosmonauts will spend around seven hours deploying and activating a radiator on the Nauka science module. The radiator helps balance the temperature on board the ISS, which is exposed to both the freezing climate of space, as well as the heat from the Sun’s rays.
This will mark the pair’s fourth time venturing out into the vacuum of space together. Just last week, Prokopyev and Petelin relocated an experimental airlock from the space station’s Rassvet module to its Nauka module.
Towards the end of the May 3 spacewalk, Prokopyev flung an 5 kg bag of leftover parts into space as he exclaimed, “It flies beautifully.” The brief incident gained some attention online but NASA was quick to point out that the hardware litter would quickly burn up in Earth’s atmosphere and posed no threat to other objects in orbit.
Spacewalker Sergey Prokopyev jettisons a 5-kilogram bundle of obsolete hardware into the vacuum of space to harmlessly burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Watch now… https://t.co/yuOTrYNGst pic.twitter.com/mpnwm2woNO
— International Space Station (@Space_Station) May 4, 2023
The cosmonauts’ second spacewalk together took place on April 19, when the pair installed a radiator on the ISS, the same one that they are set to deploy and activate during Friday’s spacewalk. Prokopyev and Petelin had a less-than-perfect experience during their first spacewalk in November 2022, when a spacesuit malfunction cut the extravehicular activity short.
Twitter and bookmark Gizmodo’s dedicated Spaceflight page.