Two of the astronauts at the ISS successfully completed a spacewalk that officially started on Tuesday at 12:11 a.m. EDT (0411 GMT). The tour outside the space station in the wee hours of the morning was undertaken to replace a video camera and to improve a cable connection to a new module to the station to enable it to park at the station. The astronauts were from mission that was named as Expedition 24 saw a space flight that lasted six hours.
The walk was completed by flight engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Mikhail Kornienko among the total six crew members of the mission. During the time this spacewalk the other members were working on other maintenance activities that were required in the space station. Their spacewalk was a little delayed and began about half an hour beyond the scheduled time.
In a press briefing NASA’s Expedition 24 spacewalk flight director, Chris Edelen.said “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.”
The two purposes of the spacewalk were successfully completed. Firstly, a broken camera was replaced with a new camera that was recently delivered to the station. The camera is very essential in tracking the European Automated Transfer Vehicles or in other words the unmanned cargo ships that are used to transfer supplies to the station. The broken camera will be removed with a ratchet and finally replaced with a new one. Then after dealing with the camera problem, the astronauts will then get busy in connecting the $200 million room was delivered to the station in May by the visiting space shuttle Atlantis.
This task will be accomplished by connecting a series of cables. The first of the cables will link the module with Russian Command and Data Handling computers. Another set of cords will connect Rassvet with the station’s Kurs automated docking system to allow incoming vehicles to automatically connect with Rassvet’s docking port. After all the work the hardware debris will be jettisoned into space. From here the orbiting space junk will eventually loose altitude and enter the Earth’s atmosphere after about 120 days, the junk will then burn up in the atmosphere itself due to friction.