Astronauts Go for a Spacewalk to Repair ISS

A US and a UK astronauts are replacing a failed voltage regulator that caused a loss of power.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) – A US and a British astronaut have left the International Space Station (ISS) to perform maintenance works in open space, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said Friday.

"The astronauts are embarking on the 192nd spacewalk in support of space station assembly and maintenance to replace a failed voltage regulator that caused a loss of power to one of the station’s eight power channels last November," NASA wrote on its blog.

The European Space Agency's astronaut Tim Peake and NASA's Tim Kopra have switched their spacesuits to battery power at 12:48 GMT, "signifying the start of today’s spacewalk," the administration said.

Peake and Kopra have arrived at the ISS aboard a Souyz TMA-19M spacecraft in mid-December alongside Russian cosmonauts Yuri Malenchenko and Sergei Volkov. Malenchenko and Volkov are scheduled to perform their first Extravehicular Activity of 2016 on February 3.

The maintenance works to replace a tripped current-switching device destroyed by a short-circuit is planned to take 6.5 hours.

Peake, the United Kingdom's first astronaut, is performing a first spacewalk of his career.