spacetoday.net: Cosmonauts perform spacewalk with Olympic torch

Posted: Sun, Nov 10, 2013, 10:19 AM ET (1519 GMT)
ISS EVA on 2013 November 9 (NASA)

Two Russian cosmonauts conducted a spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Saturday, carrying out a photo opportunity for the Olympic torch but having mixed success with other tasks. Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy spent five hours and 50 minutes outside the station on a spacewalk that started at 9:34 am EST (1434 GMT) Saturday. The first task the two performed was to show off the torch for the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. The torch arrived on the station Thursday, brought to the station by an arriving Soyuz spacecraft, and it will return to Earth with a departing Soyuz Sunday night. The spacewalkers then performed a series of tasks outside the Russian segment of the station, including setting up a workstation installed on the Zvezda module in August. However, cosmonauts had to defer the installation of a foot restraint on the workstation to a future spacewalk because of alignment issues, and the stowage of an antenna on a deactivated experiment elsewhere on the module was also deferred.