spacetoday.net: Cosmonauts perform ISS spacewalk

Posted: Fri, Feb 17, 2012, 7:24 AM ET (1224 GMT)
ISS EVA on 2012 Feb 16 (NASA)

Two cosmonauts worked outside the International Space Station for over six hours on Thursday, moving a crane and performing other tasks. Oleg Kononenko and Anton Shkaplerov spent six hours and 15 minutes outside the ISS in a spacewalk that ended at 3:46 pm EST (2046 GMT) Thursday. Their primary task was to move the Strela-1 crane from the Pirs airlock module to the nearby Poisk module on the Russian segment of the station. The move, originally planned for an EVA that took place last August, is part of work to replace the Pirs module with a multipurpose lab module next year. The two also installed a materials experiment on the station's exterior and took samples from the insulation of the station's Zvezda module, but ran out of time before they could install new debris shields on that module.