Article Posted on : - Aug 03, 2011

The International Space Station.

WASHINGTON (BNS): Two Russian cosmonauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) are getting ready to embark on a spacewalk to install scientific equipment at the orbital station.

Expedition 28 Flight Engineers Sergei Volkov and Alexander Samokutyaev – will begin the six-hour long spacewalk at 10:30 am EDT Wednesday (1430 GMT).

The duo, wearing Russian Orlan-MK spacesuits, will venture out from the Pirs docking module of the space lab. This will be Volkov’s third spacewalk and Samokutyaev’s first.

The spacewalk will be conducted to deploy an amateur radio microsatellite named ‘Kedr’ (in Russian) which is devoted to the 50th anniversary of Yury Gagarin’s space mission.

The 25.8 kg satellite, also called ARISSat-1, is part of the Radio Amateur Satellite Corp. (AMSAT). It is designed to transmit greeting messages in 15 languages and relay images of Earth and telemetry data to amateur radio operators as it orbits the Earth.

The cosmonauts will also install a prototype laser communications system which will be used to test the use of a laser-based system for high-speed transmissions at up to 100 megabytes a second to the Earth from Russian science experiments.

The system will be installed on a universal work platform outside the Zvezda service module hull just behind its solar arrays, NASA said.