Everybody loves some good Earth porn, and if the mission currently in progress goes off without a hitch, we’ll all be in for a lot more of it. A pair of cosmonauts are currently on a spacewalk to install an Earth-facing Ultra HD camera on the ISS that will eventually livestream our blue marble to the internet in (almost) realtime.
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Here’s astronaut Mike Hopkins taking the selfie to end all selfies. It’s over, you cant’ beat it, give up, return your camera, become a horse jockey. Hopkins snapped a photo of himself in full astronaut suit outside of the ISS as he was spacewalking on Christmas Eve with the beautiful blue Earth in the background. And he didn’t even need to use a filter.
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For only the second time in NASA history, two astronauts made a spacewalk on Christmas Eve. Astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Michael Hopkins installed a new ammonia pump to fix the cooling loop on the ISS. You can’t beat that Christmas Eve, even if you’re Santa Claus.
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It’s no lazy Saturday on the International Space Station: astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Michael Hopkins have just begun the first of three spacewalks to fix a faulty cooling loop on the outside of the ISS. And you can watch it live.
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Today I found out that the first man to walk in space almost got stuck out there. That lucky individual was Alexei Leonov, who was born in the Soviet Union on May 30, 1934. He was one of the twenty Soviet Air Force Pilots to be chosen for the first cosmonaut group.
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While you’re just settling in at your desk, Russian cosmonauts Alexander Mizurkin and Fyodor Yurchikhin on the International Space Station have been awake for hours preparing for today’s 10:40AM EST spacewalk to install cables (including ethernet) on the outside of the station. And you can watch the whole thing live, right here.
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During last week’s spacewalk aboard the ISS, astronaut Luca Parmitano suffered a slight—but terrifying—wardrobe malfunction: his helmet began filling with water
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ISS Flight Engineers Chris Cassidy and Luca Parmitano are set to commence a spacewalk on the ISS today starting at 8:10 ET. The pair will undertake the final installation of bypass jumpers, providing essential power redundancy to critical components. Other tasks to be completed on the walk include replacing a video camera, relocating wireless television kit and performing vital checks on component door covers. This will be the fifth spacewalk performed on the ISS this year, and the 171st in support of the station overall. You can watch the preliminaries right now, or head back at 8:10 to catch the action.
Update: As those watching will be aware, the spacewalk wound up being cut considerably short due to a water leak in astronaut Luca Parmitano’s helmet that required him to be assisted back inside the space station.
Source: NASA
No doubt: the following spacewalk photos are the best I have seen in a very long time. I just cannot stop staring at the stunning photos captured during the spacewalk of ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano and NASA’s Chris Cassidy, on the 9th of July, released by the European Space Agency today on its webpage and on Flickr.
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