On Monday, August 10, the International Space Station's windows was scrubbed clean as two Russian cosmonauts began working this week during a spacewalk outside the orbiting space lab.
The astronauts who started working are the station's commander, Gennady Padalka and flight engineer Mikhail Kornienko, where they also installed some new equipment on the exterior of the station and have taken some photos in order to study the outer surface of the lab, for almost six hours.
The duo also completed their spacewalk 40 minutes ahead of their estimated time to complete a spacewalk, after they finished the installation of gap spanners located on the station' hull which is their first task. This new equipment can assist crew members to maneuver easily outside the lab, which is located in lower Earth orbit, 250 miles above the planet.
The spacewalk began at 10:20 A.M. EDT and was finished by 3:51 P.M. EDT, after Padalka and Kornienko both finished their tasks, closing the hatch of the ISS' Pirs module.
They cleaned the windows to remove some dirt leftover by exhaust fumes from other space transport and cargo vehicles, they also did a replacement of an old antenna and had taken photos of the locations and hardware equipment outside the Zvezda command module before finally installing fasteners for the communication antennas.
According to spacewalk specialist Devan Bolch, the cosmonauts adapted a unique cleaning tool kit that has two swabs and handles between them. The swabs appear to be made from some kind of terry cloth, similar to cleaning cars' headlights when they get foggy.
Apart from cleaning duties, the astronauts also captured footage of their spacewalk using compact, handy cameras when they were communicating constantly with each other with Russian mission control.
This is the ISS' fourth spacewalk this year and the 10th one for Padalka who holds the current record of the most experienced astronaut in the world when it comes to space flying. In total, Padalka already completed three stays aboard the station that sums up to 845 days. This expedition is also Kornienko's second spacewalk.