Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano, the current commander of the International Space Station (ISS), was leading one of the most challenging spacewalks ever on Friday.
The spacewalk is the first of a series of at least four needed to service the cosmic-particle-hunting Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02).
It is considered be toughest spacewalk series since work to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Parmitano and his spacewalking partner, NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan, went outside the ISS at around 13:00 Italian time.
They have to get to a hard-to-reach area on top of the Station's S3 Truss structure between a pair of solar arrays and radiators.
The entire spacewalk is expected to take around six hours.
Parmitano, who is widely known by his Twitter name AstroLuca, is the first European to lead a spacewalk.
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