KOROLYOV, August 17 (RIA Novosti) – Two Russian cosmonauts completed their spacewalk about an hour later than scheduled, a spokesman for the Russian mission control center said on Saturday.
Two crew members, cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin, successfully coped with all their tasks, which included putting equipment in place for the arrival of a new Russian laboratory later this year and preparing for an installation of an optical telescope.
They also installed a panel of experiments designed to collect data on the effects of the microgravity environment in low-Earth orbit.
The spacewalk was due to last about six hours and end at 1:19 Moscow time on Saturday (9.19 p.m. GMT on Friday), but routing power cables for the future arrival of the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM) took longer than scheduled.
The MLM will be launched aboard a Proton rocket from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan in late 2013.
The journey marks the 172nd spacewalk in support of assembly and maintenance performed on the International Space Station (ISS), the $100-billion orbiting laboratory built by 15 countries. It is the seventh spacewalk for Yurchikhin and second for Misurkin.