MOSCOW, Oct. 17 (Xinhua) -- Russian cosmonauts have completed the first spacewalk of 2025 from the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS), the state space corporation Roscosmos said Thursday.
According to the Roscosmos live broadcast, the extravehicular activity (EVA) began about 30 minutes later than scheduled and lasted for six hours, 11 minutes, and 12 seconds, exceeding the planned duration of five hours and 38 minutes.
During the spacewalk, cosmonauts Sergei Ryzhikov and Alexei Zubritsky installed scientific equipment designed for growing high-purity semiconductor crystals, dismantled the high-resolution camera from the Zvezda module and released it into space, cleaned one of the module's portholes, and retrieved a cassette container from the Poisk module.
The operation was conducted using Russia's latest Orlan-MKS spacesuits developed by the Zvezda research and production enterprise. For the first time, the EVA employed two adjustable-length safety tethers for each cosmonaut, an improvement aimed at increasing flexibility and safety during spacewalks, Roscosmos said.
The newly installed equipment, part of the Ekran-M experiment, was developed by the A.V. Rzhanov Institute of Semiconductor Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The experiment aims to use the advantages of microgravity and the vacuum of space to grow ultra-pure and precisely structured semiconductor crystals.
In the Ekran-M chamber, located in the multipurpose laboratory module Nauka, cosmonauts will test the production of high-purity gallium arsenide films, which are used in solar cells. If successful, the project could pave the way for future orbital mini-factories capable of producing photovoltaic elements directly in space.
Following the completion of the spacewalk, Dmitry Akhmerov, a leading engineer from the Extravehicular Activity Department of the Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, said Ryzhikov and Zubritsky would carry out another spacewalk within the next two weeks. ■
