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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This has been reported in bbc.com dated 23 July 2015.

Since the US has already retired its Space Shuttle operation in 2011, the only option for manned flights to the ISS is by use of Russia's ageing Soviet space technology. This flight was to have taken place earlier but had to be postponed due to failure of the launch of the cargo rocket.
The three astronauts were supposed to have taken off in May but Moscow had to delay the flight after the 28 April crash. That was when an unmanned Soyuz cargo rocket failed to reach the station and burned up in the atmosphere before it crashed back to Earth.
The International Space Station is located about 400-Km above planet Earth.
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He did the spacewalk for more than 20 minutes as he maneuvered himself around the Gemini spacecraft while it travelled from over Hawaii to the Gulf of Mexico – his total orbital stroll was 6,500 miles long.
After that historic first, astronauts of NASA have carried out spacewalks, or extravehicular activity (EVA), on the Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs. As per statistics, astronauts have explored the lunar surface, completed 82 spacewalks outside of the space shuttle, and 187 spacewalks outside the International Space Station.
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International Space Station astronauts to enjoy turkey on Thanksgiving Day

The orbiting laboratory International Space Station (ISS) located 250-miles up in Space plan to celebrate Thanksgiving Day like their friends and families on Earth – thanks to the food scientists of NASA who have cooked up a zero-g menu for them. Those would be zero-g versions of classic Thanksgiving dishes scheduled for the celebration. The American astronauts who are at present living on the ISS are Commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore and flight engineer Terry Virts apart from Italian-born flight engineer Samantha Cristoforetti.
They would get a day off on Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the occasion.
As per the program, they would get together for some "traditional" Turkey Day fare — which includes smoked turkey, candied yams, green beans and mushrooms, cornbread stuffing and cherry-blueberry cobbler.
It seems the crewmembers can also enjoy some personal Thanksgiving favorites.
Commander Wilmore is from Tennessee, he grew up drinking sweet tea and he plans to have it up there in the ISS and share it with his fellow astronauts.
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For the records, Thanksgiving has been celebrated in the ISS since the first Americans came on board in 2000. However, the first ever Thanksgiving in space happened on board the Skylab in 1973 – it was the first space station of the US. The date was Nov. 22, 1973, and it had American astronauts Jerry Carr, Bill Pogue and Ed Gibson – but, on that first extraterrestrial Thanksgiving, there was no day off for the astronauts.