MOSCOW, August 3 (Itar-Tass) — Two Russian cosmonauts of the International Space Station (ISS) crew are to take a spacewalk on Wednesday under the Russian programme.
An official at the Flight Control Center outside Moscow has told Itar-Tass, “ISS-28 flight engineers Sergei Volkov and Alexander Samokutyayev are to open the hatches of the docking module Pier and launch extravehicular activities (EVA) at 18:35, Moscow time”.
Both cosmonauts will for the first time work in a computerized spacesuits Orlan-MK with a liquid-crystal display unit. The insrumentation will prompt them which systems and in in which sequence must be checked prior to egress into the open space and what must be done in the even of an unconventional situation.
To Samokutyayev, this will be a debut spacewalk in his career. His crewmate Volkov is a more experienced cosmonaut: the first hereditary cosmonaut of Russia has to his credit two EVA sessions with an aggregate duration of over 12 hours. However, previously, he engaged in EVA in a previous-series spacesuit Orlan-M.
At first the cosmonauts are to manually launch a student microsatellite Kedr (cedar) which will be transmitting 25 messages of greeting in 17 languages, as well as the photos of the Earth and telemetric data from the scientific instrumentation and service systems. The cosmonauts are then to install and switch on a monoblock of the onboard laser communication terminal, and transfer a derrick from the docking module Pier to the Poisk (search) one (MIM-2), mount a platform with three Biorisk containers on the outer surface of Zvezda (star) module and photograph the antenna of the interboard radio line and outboard containets with specimens of materials.
The EVA will also include a “photo session” agains the background of the Earth with portraits of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the founder of cosmonautics, spaceships’ designer Sergei Korolyov, and the world’s first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
The launch of the microsatellite, which was named in honour of Gagarin’s call-signal, and the photographing of his portrait in the open space are conducted in the scope of ceremonies on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of man’s first-ever space flight.
The other crew members of the ISS-28 mission — Russian cosmonaut Andrei Borisenko, NASA astronauts Ronald Garan Michael Fossum, and astronaut Satoshi Furukawa of the Japanese space agency JAXA – will ensure the safety of their crew mates from board the ISS.
The EVA are expected to continue for five hours and 55 minutes.