Russian cosmonauts completed a six-hour spacewalk early Wednesday and installed an earthquake research equipment on the outer surface of the International Space Station (ISS).
During the second routine spacewalk, Cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko also inspected the locating holes of an antenna adapter, which is used for long-distance tracking of the approach of spaceships, Itar-Tass cited the mission control center near Moscow as saying.
The third ISS crewmember, NASA astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, remained inside the descent capsule of the Soyuz spaceship during the spacewalk, said Valery Lyndin, spokesman of the Flight Control Center.
The new geophysical experiment, Vsplesk, was designed to predict earthquake with a possible error of 100 to 200 km by registering and analyzing the fluxes of medium-energy electrons and protons in the near-Earth space, said project director Professor Arkady Galper.
The cosmonauts also removed one of three Biorisk containers in which spores of bacteria and mushrooms, seeds of plants, crustaceans and mosquito larvae, have been kept outside the station since June last year.
Another two such containers will be kept outside the ISS for 18 and 24 months to find out whether microorganisms can survive in the rigorous conditions of the open space, where temperature stands between 100 degrees below zero to 100 degrees above zero Celsius.