14 DAY TRIAL // In an effort to prepare the International Space Station (ISS) for future equipments and parts that need to be installed on it, two astronauts from Expedition 26 will carry out an extravehicular activity (EVA) today, January 21.
The two crew members will go outside the protective confines of the station, and install a new television camera and another radio transmission system on the exterior of the orbital facility.
This is meant to assists astronauts that will carry out other assembly work in the near future, and also those who will go outside the ISS to install fresh scientific experiments.
NASA's flight manifest shows that the EVA will be carried out by Russian cosmonauts and Expedition 26 flight engineers Dmitry Kondratyev and Oleg Skripochka, who are both enrolled in the Russian Federal Space Agency (RosCosmos).
Like all other spacewalks, today's is expected to last a little over six hours as well. The two astronauts are scheduled to exit through the airlock on the ISS Pirs docking module at around 1420 UTC.
In addition to the aforementioned tasks, the two will also have to retrieve a series of scientific experiments that were taken outside the station during a previous sortie. A critical aspect of their EVA is the installation of a new video camera on Rassvet.
The small module acts as a miniature research facility, a storage container, but also as an extra docking port for Russian-built Soyuz and Progress spacecraft. The new camera system that the cosmonauts will install will help controllers at Mission Control dock spacecraft more easily.
The American space agency will provide live coverage of the event beginning on 9 am EST (1400 UTC) on NASA TV, and the general public is invited to tune in, Space reports.
This is the first of two EVA that Kondratyev and Skripochka are scheduled to conduct. The second one is currently set for February 16, and it will see the installation of two new scientific experiments on the Russian Zvezda module.
Today's sortie is the first into space for Kondratyev. Viewers tuning in to NASA TV will be able to recognize him by the red stripes on his Russian Orlan-MK spacesuit. On the other hand, Skripochka is at his second EVA, and this will be made visible by the blue stripes on his suit.