spacetoday.net: Russian ISS spacewalk partially successful

Posted: Thu, Aug 4, 2011, 6:56 AM ET (1056 GMT)
ISS EVA on 2011 Aug 3 (NASA)

Two Russian cosmonauts worked for nearly six and a half hours outside the International Space Station on Wednesday but we not able to complete all their planned tasks. Sergei Volkov and Alexander Samokutyaev completed the six-hour, 23-minute EVA at 5:13 pm EDT (2113 GMT), highlighted by the deployment of a 26-kilogram amateur radio satellite called ARISSat-1. That deployment was delayed because of a problem with one of the satellite's antennas. Ground controllers later decided to have the cosmonauts release the satellite despite the problem, which may impair its ability to receive commands from the ground. That delayed deployment, as well as extra time needed to install a laser communications terminal forced controllers to defer one major element of the spacewalk, the movement of a cargo boom from the Pirs module to the Poisk module, to a future spacewalk. The spacewalkers were able to complete several other smaller tasks during the EVA, including the removal a docking antenna that was no longer needed and the installation a material science experiment.