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Oleg Artemyev and Samantha Cristoforetti on their spacewalk
Photo: dpa
Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti was the first European woman to leave the International Space Station for a multi-hour mission.
Live images from the US space agency Nasa showed how the Italian set out for a walk in space with her Russian colleague Oleg Artemyev.
Cristoforetti wore a space suit with blue stripes, Artemyev a space suit with red stripes.
45-year-old Cristoforetti is the first Italian woman in space.
The ESA astronaut also currently holds the record for the longest uninterrupted space flight by a European woman (199 days and 16 hours).
For Artemyev it is already the sixth spacewalk.
Read the SPIEGEL interview with Samantha Cristoforetti here: »We will simply not address the topic of Ukraine«
The extravehicular activity (EVA) should last up to six and a half hours.
Among other things, the team should install a telescopic boom, a robotic arm that can help astronauts with further external missions, as the European space agency ESA reports.
The Russian space agency Roskosmos announced on its Telegram channel that several mini-satellites should also be deployed.
After the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, there was trouble about the robotic arm of the European Space Agency (ESA), which is called ERA: Esa had joined the sanctions against Russia, whereupon the then Roskosmos boss Dmitry Rogozin told his employees on July 12 ordered to stop working with the ERA manipulator.
Rogozin was replaced a few days later.
For the time being, the robotic arm will remain on the Russian module »Poisk« (»Search«) and will help with future external work.
The astronauts who left their spaceship in the history of the ISS currently include four Germans, including Matthias Maurer, Thomas Reiter (2006), Hans Schlegel (2008) and Alexander Gerst (2014).
Maurer only completed an outside operation on March 23 of this year.
ptz/dpa