JUNIOR CIVIL ENGINEER: ISS Russian EVA 18

Spacewalk Complete, Debris Panels Installed (30th May 2007) Two International Space Station cosmonauts successfully completed a 5-hour, 25-minute spacewalk from the Pirs docking compartment airlock Wednesday, installing Service Module Debris Protection (SMDP) panels and rerouting a Global Positioning System antenna cable. Additional SMDP panels will be installed on Zvezda during a second spacewalk by the cosmonauts, Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineer Oleg Kotov, on June 6. During that spacewalk they also will install a section of an Ethernet cable on the Zarya module and a Russian experiment called Biorisk on Pirs. Yurchikhin, the lead spacewalker, EV1, and Kotov, EV2, wore Russian Orlan spacesuits. It was the first spacewalk for both. After leaving the Pirs airlock at 3:05 pm EDT, the spacewalkers moved to the Strela 2, one of the hand-operated cranes at the base of Pirs. They attached an extension to the Strela boom. With Kotov on the end of the extension, Yurchikhin extended the boom to a point over Pressurized Mating Adaptor 3 (PMA-3), on the Unity Node, a distance of about 60 feet. Yurchikhin, with guidance from Kotov, maneuvered the Strela end effector to a grapple fixture on the SMDP Adaptor, a stowage rack. It is attached to PMA-3 and held three bundles of SMDP panels, a total of 17 of them. The assembly has been dubbed the "Christmas Tree". Once the Christmas Tree was attached to Strela and released from PMA-3, Yurchikhin moved it and Kotov back to ...