On June 22, two Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and flight engineer Dmitry Petelin spent six hours outside the International Space Station, removing and throwing overboard unnecessary instruments from the Zvezda module. The commander of the 69th expedition Prokopyev and Petelin disconnected the data relay unit and the telemetry transmitter, as well as the outdated equipment of the experiment to measure seismic activity on Earth, before throwing it all overboard so that it would burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The experiment called “Seismoprognoz” was installed outside the Zvezda service module almost 10 years ago. Like the communication units, the “Seismoprognoz” was ejected from the space station in a direction that guaranteed its combustion in the atmosphere.
The devices thrown overboard, as well as the stanchions holding the equipment on the module, made way for the installation of new equipment, including a mono block for a new high-speed data transmission unit.
The cosmonauts also documented the condition of the deflectors on the aft part of the Zvezda service module for further analysis by Russian engineers on Earth. Deflectors protect the station from the exhaust gases of the module’s engines. The inspection is taking place for the first time in 23 years after the Russian module joined the ISS in July 2000.
“Well, it hasn’t been washed for quite some time. It looks like a dirty frying pan. That could have made some good fries in it,” Prokopyev said.
The duo then moved to the opposite side of the “Zvezda” to clean one of the contaminated windows of the module with towels, which were then also thrown into space. Before returning to the ISS, the astronauts also took with them a package with biological samples, which was located near the hatch to the Poisk airlock.
The spacewalk was the ninth this year and the 266th dedicated to servicing the International Space Station since 1998.
Earlier we reported on how the risk of death from falling space debris was calculated.
According to space.com
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