Russian cosmonauts living and working on the International Space Station are set to venture outside for a spacewalk that’s expected to last six hours.
Astronauts, Oleg Artemyev and Sergey Prokopyev of the Russian space agency are scheduled to exit the Pirs airlock at 11:58 a.m. EDT. Live coverage of the spacewalk will begin at 11:15 a.m.
Artemyev and Prokopyev will manually launch four small technology satellites, retrieve material science samples from the hull of the Zvezda service module and install an experiment called Icarus onto the Russian segment of the space station.
Icarus is a collaborative environmental experiment between Germany and Russia that studies the migratory patterns of small animals on Earth. It consists of an antenna and GPS hardware to track the movements of animals that have been tagged with small GPS receivers. The experiment may provide data about how animals move from one location to another, how animal population density shifts over time, and how diseases spread.
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The spacewalk will be the 212 one in support of station assembly, maintenance and upgrades, the third in Artemyev’s career and the first for Prokopyev.
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