After years and years without a shine, two Russian cosmonauts took a spacewalk to scrub all the dirt and fumes from the International Space Station’s windows. While scrubbing windshields is fairly easy and quick here on Earth, in space everything’s a lot more difficult. The whole operation took five and half hours. Granted, the two cosmonauts completed two other tasks during this time: they retrieved an old experiment which measured how superheated gas from space affected the ISS hull and also cut loose an old communication antenna. Just a regular day’s work, I guess.
Performing the mission were flight engineer Mikhail Kornienko, only at his second space walk, and veteran Gennady Padalka who has been performing space walks since the Mir space station was still online. Padalka is in fact the most experienced space walker in history with ten walks summing more than 35 hours. Overall, this was the 188th spacewalk of all station astronauts, which in total add up to 1,177 hours of spacewalking.
In the meantime, astronauts inside the space station were enjoying the very first veggies grown in space. Exciting times to be an astronaut.
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