Though a piece of gear that had been misaligned on the International Space Station caused headaches for the spacewalking cosmonauts, they had eventually become successful and even celebrated the Flag Day of Russia in a unique orbital fashion.
Fyodor Yurchikhin, a veteran cosmonaut, proudly waved his country’s flag as he soars 418 kilometers (260 miles) above Earth in celebration of the Russian holiday dubbed as ‘Flag Day.’ Incidentally, the historic event coincided with their almost six-hour duration of spacewalk.
Yurchikhin was joined by fellow cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin. They chanted three ‘hoorahs’ while they strike a pose for TV and still cameras. They even joked that some TV viewers would find it hard to believe that they were in space as the flag floats around them. Perhaps people would think that they were doing some staged performance when in reality, they were doing everything in space.
Yurchikhin and Misurkin had started their spacewalk journey at 7:36am EDT (1136 GMT). All in all, they have spent five hours and 58 minutes working outside the Earth which is their second spacewalk adventure in six days. The cosmonauts set a new record of accomplishing the longest Russian spacewalk after spending more than seven hours outside their space station on August 16.
Soon after they had begun their spacewalking, the cosmonauts were faced with a huge obstruction to their primary goal which is installing a swivel-equipped platform in order to house two cameras needed for a new optical-based telescope. Apparently, the platform base had been misaligned which had caused the Mission Control in Russia to be deeply concerned thinking that it could spoil its original plan for the new telescope. Pat Ryan, a spokesman from NASA, further explained that if the support for the cameras were not placed in the right direction, the experiment would be greatly threatened.
The 173rd spacewalk was dedicated to the maintenance or construction of the International Space Station. Its assembly began in 1998 and had its first batch of resident crews in 2000. Since then, it had been regularly manned by rotation series of its crews.
