The Russian cosmonauts on the International Space Station stepped out for their first spacewalk of the year. As cooperation is still close between the Russian and American space agencies, NASA broadcast the spacewalk on its media channel and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced it earlier in the day.
The estimated duration of the work was five hours and 27 minutes. This is the second spacewalk for ISS-74 commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and the first for flight engineer Sergei Mikayev. Inside the station, Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyayev, a member of the Crew-12 crew, was on duty at the control panel of the European robotic arm (ERA).
The main objective of the mission was to install the unique Russian instrument “Solntse-Terahertz,” a radio telescope for observing the Sun in the previously unexplored terahertz range. According to Kud-Sverchkov, the observation data will help better understand the mechanisms of solar flares, improve their prediction accuracy, develop protective measures against radiation exposure, and test the possibility of early detection of hazardous space objects.
Additionally, the cosmonauts will remove the third container of the Biorisk experiment from the Poisk module, which spent nearly five years in outer space. Scientists will then determine how bacteria, seeds, and crustacean cysts withstood vacuum and radiation conditions.
