14 DAY TRIAL // Two Russian cosmonauts will today carry out a new spacewalk, from aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The mission specialists, Fyodor Yurchikhin and Mikhail Kornienko, both flight engineers for Expedition 24, will attempt to change a broken camera later today, and also to wire a few connections aboard a new ISS room. The Mini Research Module (MRM-1), called Rassvet, is to be prepared for autonomous docking procedures carried out by unmanned cargo spacecraft.
The new extravehicular activity (EVA) will begin at 11:45 pm EDT (0345 GMT Tuesday), and will last for approximately 6 hours, according to officials at the American space agency. The two spacewalkers will exit the station through the airlock on the Russian-built Pirs docking compartment, and will first attempt to fix the broken video camera. Yurchikhin, who is at his fifth exit in space, will coordinate the mission, and will command Kornienko, who will today perform his first spacewalk. Inside the ISS, the rest of the crew will perform science and maintenance tasks, Space reports.
“The crew is going to replace a degraded video camera at the aft end of the Zvezda module and replace it with a new one that was recently delivered to the station. The video camera currently on orbit has numerous bad pixels resulting in degraded picture quality,” explained last week in a press briefing Chris Edelen. He is the NASA spacewalk flight director for Expedition 24. This particular device is extremely important because it tracks incoming European Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATV), which needs to be surveyed closely as they approach the orbital facility.
“In this case with the ATV camera, it does present a hazard to the crew due to the insulation surrounding the camera. The concern is that that insulation could flake loose inside the cabin [if brought back inside], resulting in fibers that the crew could breathe in. So once that determination was made then it was clear that jettisoning was the right thing to do,” the expert adds of the challenges scientists at Mission Control had to deal with. After the camera is repaired, the astronauts will move to the MRM-1, where they will connect numerous cable and cords between Rassvet and the ISS.