A spacewalk is one of the most fanciable aspirations of mankind. The National Aeronautics and Space Association (NASA) gave us all a glimpse of life up in the International Space Station (ISS) by live streaming its latest spacewalks on YouTube, undetaken yesterday, May 29. The walk was undertaken by cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, commander of NASA's Expedition 59, and his colleague, Alexey Ovchinin, and lasted for six hours and one minute.
While the live stream is over, you can still watch it here:
The walk was scheduled for the two cosmonauts to retrieve scientific experiments around the ISS, as well as carry out scheduled maintenance tasks on it. These tasks included installation of a handrail on the ISS ship, as well as cleaning the outer windows of it. Both the experiment retrieval and the installation and maintenance were undertaken on the Russian module Poisk, stationed at the ISS.
The latest spacewalk was the 217th one to be undertaken in favour of assembly, maintenance and repair of the ISS — over a space of 21 years since 1998. Hailing the walk, Russian space agency Roscosmos stated that it was dedicated to Alexey Leonov, the first man to have conducted a spacewalk. In poetic eloquence, Roscosmos described Leonov as "the man who took a step into the unknown and found himself one-on-one with unlimited outer space."
For Kononenko, this marked his fifth spacewalk during his long stay aboard the ISS of nearly 6.5 months. He, along with fellow astronauts Anne McClain (of NASA) and David Saint-Jacques (of the canadian Space Agency) have served their due at the ISS, and will be heading back to Earth aboard a home-bound module, which is scheduled to leave from ISS on June 24. Yesterday's spacewalk, hence, was of greater significance for Ovchinin, who conducted his very first spacewalk, and will soon take over command of the ISS orbital module, once Kononenko and his colleagues leave their abode.
The science experiment in question, which was retrieved from outside the Poisk module, was a plasma wave experiment -- one of the multiple aspects of exposure to space, done in a bid to better understand mankind's potential of survival out in the endless frontier of space. Experiments such as these will help mankind prepare better for long duration space travel, in their quest to find traces of life and life forms, which may lie in any of the farthest corners of the galaxy, billions of light years away.
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