Image above: Expedition 12 Commander Bill McArthur KC5ACR assists Flight Engineer Valery Tokarev as he puts on an American spacesuit. Image credit: NASA

Radio Amateur gets ready for spacewalk

Active radio amateur and Expedition 12 Commander Bill McArthur, KC5ACR, and Flight Engineer Valery Tokarev are ready for their mission's first spacewalk.

Scheduled for Monday morning at 9:30 a.m. EST, the spacewalkers will install a new video camera on the P1 truss structure and jettison a probe attached to the top of the P6 truss.

As McArthur and Tokarev continued station maintenance activities, the international space station reached a milestone of five years of human presence aboard the complex on Wednesday, November 2.

The first crew arrived at the station on November 2, 2000. That crew, Expedition 1, consisted of Commander Bill Shepherd and Flight Engineers Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko.

• Station spacewalk to install new cameras and jettison FPP