CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Spacewalking cosmonauts on Friday installed two cameras outside the International Space Station for a Canadian streaming-video business, but then retrieved the gear after electrical connections failed.
Station commander Oleg Kotov and flight engineer Sergey Ryazanskiy left the station's Pirs airlock at 8 a.m. ET as the complex sailed 260 miles (418 kilometers) over Australia, mission commentator Rob Navias said during a NASA TV broadcast of the spacewalk.
It was third spacewalk this week by members of the station's six-man crew. NASA astronauts Rich Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins made spacewalks on Saturday and Tuesday to replace a failed cooling pump.
During the first part of Friday's outing, the Russian cosmonauts set up a high-definition video camera on a swiveling platform and a medium-resolution still imager for Vancouver-based UrtheCast Corp.
The Russian space agency agreed to host the cameras on its segment of the $100 billion station in exchange for rights to use images and video taken over Russia. UrtheCast has commercial rights to images and video of the rest of the world, company chief executive Scott Larson told Reuters.
UrtheCast (pronounced like "Earthcast") plans to sell data to companies and government agencies that buy Earth-observing satellite imagery. It also plans to stream images over the Internet for free to subscribers, with the aim of attracting advertisers and sponsors.
Those plans are now on hold after an unknown telemetry glitch kept the cameras, located outside the station's Zvezda command module, from communicating with ground stations.
"Unfortunately, those cameras ... did not provide any electrical signals on the ground," Navias said.
Kotov and Ryazanskiy disconnected the cameras so they could be brought back inside the station for further analysis.
Also during Friday's spacewalk, the cosmonauts also installed hardware for an earthquake-monitoring experiment called Seismoprognoz and removed an experiment known as Vsplesk (Russian for "Burst"). The five-year-old Vsplesk experiment, which studied streams of high-energy particles in the near-Earth space environment, was jettisoned into space to burn up during atmospheric re-entry.
The spacewalk lasted eight hours and seven minutes, more than an hour longer than expected. That length of time set a new duration record for Russian spacewalks, but it fell short of the U.S. record of eight hours and 56 minutes, set during a 2001 spacewalk.
This report was supplemented by NBC News.