It is all in a day’s work, so to speak, as a couple of cosmonauts went about to scrub a window on the International Space Station’s exterior. What is a rather boring chore here on earth happened to be an activity that was done in a speedy spacewalk, in the vacuum of space, now how about that? The two Russian cosmonauts who performed the window cleaning act are experienced spacewalkers, with flight engineer Mikhail Kornienko being the most experienced spacewalker in history, racking up his 10th spacewalk in the process with more than 35 hours clocked in.
The most recent spacewalk began at 10:20 am ET and went on for another 5 hours 31 minutes, and along the way, Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren of NASA, accompanied by Kimiya Yui of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, did sink their teeth in to NASA’s maiden outing at space-grown produce.
Window 2 on the service module was cleaned by the cosmonauts, as it was already smudged, no thanks to a thruster that was close by. Padalka said after the window was cleaned by his colleague, “It’s like a whole new window.” You don’t say! See, life on the International Space Station does have its moments after all, although living in such a cramped space with not a single tree in sight can be quite a bummer after a while. [Press Release]
Filed in . Read more about Space.