Russian astronauts complete six-hour ISS spacewalk

Feb 16, 2012, 21:55 GMT

Moscow - Two Russian astronauts spent more than six hours on a spacewalk Thursday to work on the International Space Station (ISS) and prepare it for updates next year.

Cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Anton Shaplerov moved a crane from the outside of a docking compartment to prepare the compartment to be replaced with a new laboratory and docking module next year, US space agency NASA said.

The pair were to have installed new shielding to protect the station's work module from microscopic rock particles and space junk, officials at Russia's national space agency Roscosmos said. But they ran out of time to complete that task during the six-hour, 15-minute spacewalk, NASA said.

The astronauts also took samples from several sections of the station's exterior surface as part of ongoing research on the long-term effect of cosmic particles on a spaceship.

The ISS' shields and solar arrays are under constant bombardment by microscopic space particles. Astronauts sometimes use the station's rockets to shift its position, to avoid larger objects.

Six astronauts are currently aboard the ISS: Shkaplerov, Kononenko, fellow Russian Anatoly Ivanishin, the US' Daniel Burbank and Donald Petit, and Andre Kuipers from the Netherlands.