A live stream of two astronauts working outside of the International Space Station is available now.
NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and the European Space Agency's Luca Parmitano were schedule to exit the orbiting lab's Quest airlock Tuesday morning at 8:10 a.m. EDT (1210 GMT), Fox News reports.
The excursion is reportedly the first of two that Expedition 36 crewmembers Cassidy and Parmitano will make together this month., with the second walk set for July 16, according to Fox News.
The purpose of the spacewalks is to prepare the $100 billion orbiting laboratory for a new Russian module and address maintenance and repair needs, Fox News reports.
"These are just a mixture of different, unrelated tasks, for the most part, that we're trying to burn down," spacewalk flight director David Korth, of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, told reporters last week.
According to Fox News, a few of the tasks will be for Cassidy to route power cables to support Russia's Multipurpose Laboratory Module, which is scheduled to arrive at the station later this year, and replace failed a communications controller unit.
Parmitano will take photographs of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), "a $2 billion instrument that was installed on the space station's exterior backbone in May 2011 to detect antimatter and hunt for evidence of elusive and mysterious dark matter," Fox News reports.
"My understanding is it's not a scientific reason," Korth told reporters about the AMS photography request. "They've seen some discoloration on the radiators. They're not sure if that was something in ground processing or some phenomenon that's happened on orbit, so they've asked if we could just get some photos, since we'll be near the work site and will have good angles."
Today's spacewalk is the fifth for Cassidy, the leader of the excursion, wearing the red stripes on his spacesuit. This is the first spacewalk Parmitano, which is also the first ever for an Italian astronaut.
Check out the live stream of the 6 1/2 hour spacewalk in the video below.
