British astronaut Major Tim Peake to go for a six and half hour spacewalk out of the ISS

#spacewalk #astronauts #timpeake British astronaut 43-year-old Major Tim Peake is going for a six hour spacewalk out the International Space Station - it will be the first ever spacewalk by a Britisher. His task is to repair a faulty power unit and, along with him would be Tim Kopra. They will face a race against the clock to conduct the repair in brief moments of darkness as the space station hurtles around the Earth.
This has been reported in dailymail.co.uk dated 15 January 2016.

Major Peake is an astronaut of the European Space Agency and Britain's first official astronaut on the ISS. He and Flight Engineer Kopra will have just 31 minute windows to install a new sequential shunt unit in total darkness outside the ISS.
Once outside the ISS, they will be hurtling at 17,227mph above the surface of the Earth. It takes 93 minutes for the ISS to orbit Earth once, therefore, the astronauts would get to experience 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day. The spacewalk, in scientific terms, is known as Extravehicular Activities (EVAs) and, Major Peake has revealed that among the tools that they will take with them outside ISS to help install the new power unit is a modified toothbrush to help clean the connections.
Major Peake and Flight Engineer Kopra would be spending nearly six and a half hours outside the ISS during the EVA. Even though the repair of the power unit is expected to take around 15 minutes if all goes smoothly, they will spend the rest of the time laying new power cables and doing other work outside the ISS. All the necessary tools are either clipped onto their spacesuit’s ‘Mini Work-Station’ or stowed inside tool bags in the order that they would be needed.

(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org

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Mangalyaan had been launched on 5 November 2013 by ISRO and was successfully inserted into the Red Planet orbit on 24 September 2014, after a 298-day transit to Mars. That made ISRO become the fourth space agency to reach Mars, after the Soviet space program, NASA, and the European Space Agency.
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(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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