Jul 15 2008
From The Space Library
In their second spacewalk in five days, Russian cosmonauts Sergei A. Volkov and Oleg D. Kononenko left the ISS to undertake a spacewalk in which they set up a docking target and worked on two scientific experiments. The ISS partners had originally scheduled the tasks for the 10 July 2008 spacewalk, but officials had postponed those activities to allow time for the removal of an explosive bolt on a Soyuz spacecraft. During the walk, which lasted nearly 6 hours, Volkov and Kononenko placed a docking target on the side of the Zvezda module, in preparation for the scheduled arrival in 2009 of a new airlock, the Mini-Research Module 2 (MRM2). The astronauts then installed a physics experiment called Vsplesk, which would study the effects of high-energy particle streams near Earth. The cosmonauts also retrieved the payload of the Biorisk experiment, which had studied the effects of space radiation and zero gravity on microorganisms. Additionally, they made an impromptu repair of a ham-radio antenna.
Jeremy Hsu, “Cosmonauts’ Second Spacewalk Goes Smoothly,” Space.com, 16 July 2008, http://www.space.com/5630-cosmonauts-spacewalk-smoothly.html (accessed 26 May 2011).
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