Expedition 59 Commander Oleg Kononenko and Flight Engineer Alexey Ovchinin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos are preparing for their exit from the station’s Pirs docking compartment airlock at approximately 11:44 a.m. EDT to begin a planned six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk at the International Space Station. NASA astronaut Christina Koch is helping the cosmonauts prepare for their spacewalk.
Coverage of the spacewalk is now underway on NASA Television and the agency’s website.
Kononenko and Ovchinin will install handrails on the Russian segment of the complex, retrieve science experiments from the Poisk module’s hull, and conduct maintenance work on the orbiting laboratory.
Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on Twitter as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.