KOROLYOV, Moscow region. Aug 4 (Interfax-AVN) - Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Alexander Samokutyayev have returned to the International Space Station (ISS) following a seven-hour spacewalk.
"The spacewalk has been completed. The cosmonauts have returned to the station," Valery Lyndin, a spokesman for the Russian space mission control in Korolyov outside Moscow, told Interfax-AVN.
This has been the 35th spacewalk taken from the Russian segment of the ISS and the third in 2011. The previous two took place on January 21 and February 17. The Russian space program envisions a total of four spacewalks in 2011.
Volkov and Samokutyayev manually launched an educational amateur-radio micro-satellite Kedr and installed an onboard laser communication terminal BTLS-N on the Zvezda service module, which should serve to transmit large amounts of scientific information back to Earth using laser communication means. After that, the cosmonauts photographed the WAL-6 antenna and dismantled the Kurs antenna and then photographed a removable container onboard the Poisk module and the Kosmoplast panel onboard the Zarya module.
In addition, the cosmonauts placed three containers with mycobacteria into the Pirs module so that they could be exposed to space radiation for a long period of time.