Two cosmonauts are about to go on a second spacewalk in a little over a week to configure a radiator on the International Space Station (ISS) that will help them stay cool. aboard the orbital lab.
Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin are scheduled to leave the space station at 11:55 a.m. ET on Friday. The spacewalk will be broadcast live on NASA TVas well as the space agency website. You can also tune in to the action via the feed below. Live coverage begins at 11:30 am ET.
The Mission
The two cosmonauts will spend about seven hours deploying and activating a radiator on the Nauka science module. The radiator helps balance the temperature aboard the ISS, which is exposed to the freezing climate of space, as well as heat from the Sun’s rays.
This will mark the pair’s fourth time together outside of space. Last week, Prokopyev and Petelin moved an experimental airlock from the space station’s Rassvet module to its Nauka module.
At the end of the May 3 spacewalk, Prokopyev tossed an 11-pound bag over the remaining parts of space as he exclaimed, “It’s going to be nice to fly.” The brief event garnered some attention online but NASA was quick to point out that hardware waste can easily burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere and there is no threat to other objects in orbit.
The second spacewalk of cosmonauts together took place on April 19, when the pair that put a radiator on the ISS, the same one they were set to deploy and activate during Friday’s spacewalk. Prokopyev and Petelin have less than perfect experience during their first spacewalk in November 2022, when a spacesuit damage reduced extravehicular activity.
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