NASA - Russian Cosmonauts to Move Cargo Boom, Deploy Ham Radio Satellite

Expedition 28 Flight Engineers Sergei Volkov and Alexander Samokutyaev conducted an EVA outside the Pirs airlock at 10:30 a.m. EDT Wednesday. A grueling six-hour excursion. Both spacewalkers wore Russian Orlan-MK spacesuits.

Coverage of the spacewalk was broadcast live on NASA Television beginning at 10 a.m. EDT.

Volkov, making his third spacewalk, and Samokutyaev, making his first, both wore spacesuits marked with blue stripes. Volkov’s previous two spacewalks occurred while he was Expedition 17 commander in 2008.

During the spacewalk, Commander Andrey Borisenko and NASA Flight Engineer Ron Garan closed the hatches on the Poisk docking module, which is opposite the Pirs airlock, and sealed the hatches between Zvezda and Poisk.

This gave them access to their Soyuz 26 spacecraft, protected them against the unlikely possibility of a sudden station depressurization and allowed the forward transfer compartment of Zvezda to be used as a backup airlock.

Flight Engineers Mike Fossum of NASA, and Satoshi Furukawa of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, was supporting them in the U.S. segment and had access to their Soyuz 27 spacecraft, which is docked to the Rassvet module.

The duo’s first task wwas to deploy a boxy, 57-pound satellite, called alternately ARISSat-1 and Radioskaf-V, which is the prototype test flight of a proposed series of educational satellites being developed in a partnership with the Radio Amateur Satellite Corp. (AMSAT), the NASA Office of Education ISS National Lab Project, the Amateur Radio on ISS (ARISS) working group and RSC-Energia.

The ARISSat design can carry up to four student experiments and the data from these experiments will be transmitted to the ground via an amateur radio link. This prototype ARISSat-1 carries one student experiment, a pressure sensor built at Kursk University in Russia, to measure atmospheric pressure for the lifetime of the satellite.


Image above: Radioskaf-V nanosatellite. Credit: NASA
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In addition to transmitting student experiment data, ARISSat-1 will transmit still-frame video Earth views from four onboard cameras, commemorative greetings in the native languages from students around the world, including messages to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the launch of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin as the first human in space.

The satellite, which uses off-the-shelf equipment and software provided by AMSAT, also features a Morse code tracking beacon and will function as a space communications utility for use by “ham” radio operators world-wide.


More information on tracking ARISSat-1 decoding its telemetry visit the AMSAT and ARISSat-1 websites:

http://www.arissat1.org/v3/

http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/