Image credit: NASA
The longest spacewalk ever performed by cosmonauts was completed on Feb. 2. Alexander Misurkin and Anton Shklaplerov floated outside of the International Space Station for 8 hours and 13 minutes to replace an electronics and telemetry box. The box, which serves a high gain antenna on the Zvezda service module, will improve communications between Earth and the Russian side of the space station.
The video from NASA shows footage from the spacewalk, as well as other NASA news from the week.
The spacewalk wasn’t supposed to last this long. Instead, the record was broken because the antenna, which had been folded up during the repairs, would not deploy. It required some laborious pushing before finally getting stuck 180 degrees from its intended position. NASA says the antenna is working fine, but another expedition may be needed to put it back in place.
The longest spacewalk on record, 8 hours and 56 minutes, was set in 2001 by astronauts Jim Voss and Susan Helms. The previous Russian record was set by Oleg Kotov and Sergei Ryazanskiy in 2013 with a time of 8 hours and 7 minutes.
Another spacewalk scheduled for the last week of January, in which American astronauts will replace the robotic hands on the end of a docking arm, was delayed to mid-February.
Image credit: NASA
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