Russian cosmonauts take six-hour stroll in space

To do list: Space station housekeeping, search for aliens

Vid Two cosmonauts successfully completed a six-hour spacewalk around the International Space Station (ISS), captured on their helmet cams, at 22.46 GMT last night.

Flight Engineers Oleg Kononenko and Anton Shkaplerov were busy with a number of housekeeping tasks, including moving the Strela-1 crane from the Pirs docking compartment to get Pirs ready for replacement next year with a new lab and docking module.

The Russians used Strela-2, a telescoping boom which is a bit like a fishing rod, to grab the crane and move it to the Poisk module.

The 'nauts also installed the Vinoslivost Materials Sample Experiment, which will examine the influence of space on the mechanical properties of the materials inside.

And while they were out there, they grabbed a test sample from under the insulation on the Zvezda service module, to see if there was any sign of living organisms in it. The pair were also supposed to install five debris shields on Zvezda, but they ran out of time.

This was the third spacewalk for Kononenko and the first for Shkaplerov and it's the only one scheduled during this expedition. ®