Live images from the US space agency NASA showed on Thursday how the Italian, together with her Russian colleague Oleg Artemyev, left the outpost of humanity through an airlock. Cristoforetti wore a space suit with blue stripes, Artemyev a space suit with red stripes.
For Artemyev it is already the sixth spacewalk. The extravehicular activity (EVA) should last up to six and a half hours. Among other things, the team should install a telescopic boom that could help astronauts with further external missions, as announced by the European Space Agency Esa.
The 45-year-old 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). 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 assignment on March 23 of this year.
Source: Nachrichten
