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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