Two cosmonauts are about to take a second spacewalk in just over a week to set up a heater on the International Space Station (ISS) that helps keep them cool board the orbital laboratory.
Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin are scheduled to depart the space station at 11:55 a.m. ET on Friday. The spacewalk will be streamed live on NASA televisionas well as that of the space agency website. You can also tune in to the action via the stream below. Live coverage will begin at 11:30 a.m. ET.
The mission
The two cosmonauts will spend approximately seven hours deploying and activating a heater on Nauka’s science module. The heater helps balance the temperature aboard the ISS, which is exposed to both the freezing climate of space and the heat of the sun’s rays.
This will be the fourth time the couple have ventured into the vacuum of space together. Just last week, Prokopyev and Petelin moved an experimental airlock from the space station’s Rassvet module to its Nauka module.
Near the end of the May 3 spacewalk, Prokopyev threw an 11-pound bag of remains into space, exclaiming, “It flies beautifully.” The brief incident drew attention online, but NASA was quick to point out that material litter would burn up rapidly in Earth’s atmosphere and posed no threat to other objects in orbit.
The second spacewalk by cosmonauts took place on April 19, when the pair installed a radiator on the ISS, the same one they must deploy and activate during Friday’s spacewalk. Prokopyev and Petelin had a less than perfect run experience during their first spacewalk in November 2022, when a spacesuit malfunction cut short extravehicular activity.
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