RSS
Home
Spacewalkers at work outside the International Space Station
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
International Space Station Commander (ISS) Mike Fincke and Flight Engineer Yury Lonchakov are hard at work outside the station.
It's the first spacewalk, or EVA, for Lonchakov and the fifth for Fincke. The team was about 40 minutes behind their original timeline in getting started on their six-hour-plus mission.
Shown above in this screen grab from NASA TV: Fincke, temporarily upright in this shot. The astronauts, orbiting 200 miles above Earth, often work upside down or in other positions to reach station components. "Up/down" orientation is very different in space than it is on Earth.
How can you tell the two white-suited spacewalkers apart? Lonchakov's Russian Orlan spacesuit has blue tripes; Fincke's matching suit has red stripes. Regardless of which style of spacesuit is used, Russian or American, working in them is very physically hard, and requires extensive training, as my spacesuit guide reveals.
Both the Russian control center and NASA mission control can be heard on the broadcast. When you listen in, you'll also get to hear conversations in Russian, translated in flow.
The Expedition 18 spacewalkers are installing new science experiments and a probe to monitor electromagnetic energy. The probe will help mission control engineers determine whether or not EM energy affected Russian pyrotechnical separation bolts, thereby causing steeper-than-normal reentries of the Expedition 15 and Expedition 16 Soyuz capsules.
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
