NASA TV

NASA TV

NASA TV

NASA TV

NASA TV

NASA TV

NASA TV

NASA TV

NASA TV

NASA TV

NASA TV

On Tuesday, over the course of nearly eight hours, Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergei Prokopyev performed an unprecedented spacewalk outside the International Space Station.

The two Russians spent about three hours moving across the station, setting up a workstation from which they could stabilize themselves and cut into a Soyuz spacecraft attached to the station. Then, with an assortment of tools including a knife and pair of scissors, they tore through a wide swath of insulation protecting the orbital module of the spacecraft.

The entire procedure was absolutely riveting, as it is not every day that one sees a person in space slicing through several centimeters of insulation with a knife. As the cosmonauts took turns working away at the insulation, bits of Mylar and other shredded materials floated away from the work site like a dirty snowstorm. (As the station is at a relatively low altitude, these materials with low mass and a high drag area should get pulled down into Earth's atmosphere and burn up, posing no threat to spaceflight activities).

Kononenko and Prokopyev worked at the insulation for a couple of hours, at times growing exasperated. A Russian translator, speaking on NASA TV, shared jarring remarks between the two cosmonauts and Roscosmos mission control, located just north of Moscow. "Please be careful, my hand is there," the translator would say. And, "Careful not to cut the cable." Repeatedly, mission control urged the hard-charging cosmonauts to take a break. It was nerve-wracking to watch the cosmonauts wield the knife in such an apparently casual manner, so close to their pressurized spacesuits.



Finding the hole

Finally, the crew members cut through the insulation to a thin debris shield, and, after pulling this away, they got to the hull of the Soyuz vehicle itself. They were looking for the exterior site of a leak in the Soyuz spacecraft detected on August 30, about two months after the vehicle had flown three crew members to the station. Using several layers of epoxy resin, astronauts inside the space station patched the slow leak—from a small hole a few millimeters across—a day after its detection. They were never in any grave danger, but the mystery of how the leak occurred has stirred up considerable intrigue.

Using a small pair of scissors—an extremely delicate process with the clumsy gloves of his spacesuit—Kononenko sought to sample the exterior of the leak site that was clearly visible in live, televised video. Presumably, taking high-definition images and GoPro video of the exterior of the leak site and collecting samples of resin or other materials there will help the Russians determine what had caused the hole initially.

This has been a murky issue for both NASA and the Russian Space Agency. While Roscosmos leader Dmitry Rogozin has been fairly diplomatic on the global stage about the leak, in Russia there have been pervasive rumors that perhaps a NASA astronaut drilled through the Soyuz in space, because he or she wanted to return home early.

This is clearly nonsense, and the far more likely story is that some accident occurred in a Russian production facility, with a technician finding the drilling mistake and covering the hole with glue. This would have prevented the problem from being detected during a vacuum test. However, this temporary patch could then have failed a couple of months later after prolonged exposure in space.

On Wednesday, Rogozin thanked the cosmonauts for their hard and ultimately successful work. "I would like to congratulate you on successfully completing the mission," he said. "The spacewalk itself, I would say, was unprecedented in terms of complexity and risks. You coped with it with huge success."

The samples collected, Rogozin said, were "extremely important for completing all investigative procedures and establishing the causes of the spacecraft’s damage." They will soon be analyzed by engineers on Earth.

This could happen as early as next week, when this Soyuz spacecraft departs the station with Prokopyev commanding and also carrying German astronaut Alexander Gerst along with NASA's Serena Auñón-Chancellor. On Wednesday, the Soyuz will move away a safe distance from the station and perform a deorbit burn that will last about 4 minutes and 30 seconds, slowing down the spacecraft and nudging it into Earth's atmosphere.

The orbital module (where the leak occurred) and the descent module will then be pyrotechnically separated from the descent module, which will turn its heat shield into Earth's atmosphere and bring the crew and their samples back to Earth.

Listing image by NASA