Russian cosmonauts install animal tracker on ISS

Moscow: Russian cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Sergei Prokopyev spent nearly eight hours on a spacewalk to install apparatus on the International Space Station (ISS) designed to track the migration patterns of animals on Earth.

The two cosmonauts began the spacewalk at 1617 GMT on Wednesday and finished at 0003 GMT yesterday, said Rob Navias, spokesman for the US space agency Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

The spacewalk lasted seven hours and 46 minutes, more than an hour longer than expected.

Navias said the cosmonauts were in “great shape” after completing all their tasks and “everything went very well – by the book – no issues during the course of today's excursion”.

The apparatus that the cosmonauts installed is a GermanRussian collaborative experiment known as Icarus.

It will use an antenna and global positioning system hardware to study the migration patterns of animals tagged with receivers.

“The experiment may provide data about how animals move from one location to another, how animal population density shifts over time and how diseases spread," Nasa said in a statement.

Wednesday’s spacewalk was the 212th in support of station assembly, maintenance and upgrades, Nasa said. It was the seventh this year from the ISS, which launched 20 years ago.

The cosmonauts also deployed four small satellites, including one that will assess how satellites group themselves in orbit and one that will measure the density of space, Navias said. — dpa