MOSCOW, October 25 Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub began their spacewalk, they will have to turn off the faulty radiator circuit, from which a leak occurred on October 9, and launch the satellite Bauman students of Parus-MSTU and install a radar for a new experiment, the broadcast of the output is carried out by Roscosmos.
The exit hatch of the Small Research Module «Poisk» was opened at 20.49 Moscow time. As Roscosmos previously reported, the entire launch will last 6 hours and 52 minutes.
First of all, the cosmonauts will disconnect the hydraulic circuits of the additional radiation heat exchanger from the external circuits of the Nauka module system. Thus, the leaking circuit from which the coolant leaked on October 9, 2023 will also be disconnected. After this, Kononenko and Chub will inspect and photograph the leak on the radiator so that specialists on Earth can determine the cause of the leak.
Next, they will have to remove the radar of the experiment on monitoring the earth's surface «Napor-miniRSA» from the «Search» module. Then Kononenko and Chub will have to connect it to the adapter and mount it on the passive fixation device UFP-2 on the Nauka, connect it and deploy it to its working position.
Then the cosmonauts will attach a universal launching device developed by students of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University to the Science module and will use it to launch a nanosatellite for the Parus-MSTU experiment. The device is equipped with a solar sail that can be extended to different lengths and the thrust can be adjusted to change the orbit.
If Kononenko and Chub have time left, they will be assigned an additional task — replacing the fixing boards on the Zvezda service module that hold the cables in a docked state.
The exit was the first within the current mission of Kononenko and Chub, who arrived at the ISS on September 15, 2023, and the sixth under the Russian program this year. Chub is working outside the ISS for the first time, Kononenko for the sixth time.