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Two astronauts are floating around in space right now, and you can watch them fix a space station for 6 1/2 hours live. Nasa astronaut Chris Cassidy and European Space Agency’s Luca Parmitano exited the orbiting lab’s Quest airlock on Tuesday morning at 8:10 a.m. EDT, marking the first spacewalk of the month. The free-floating action going on today also marks Italy’s first spacewalking astronaut; Luca Parmitano shared a tiramisu in space with his colleagues in preparation for his historic spacewalk.
According to SPACE.com, Parmitano shared a taste of his home country with 5 American and Russian crew-members in the form of specially prepared space-food. The printed menu for the meal included dishes (more like those space toothpaste food-tubes) such as a traditional antipasto appetizer, lasagna, pesto risotto, eggplant parmesan, and tiramisu. He shared his request for a special Italian dinner with collectSPACE.com, saying:
“Being Italian, I have a very special relationship with the culinary arts. One of my projects was to share Italian cultural food with my colleagues. When I made the simple request of creating a menu for myself and my crew, the Italian Space Agency jumped on the request. The chefs that went to work on this [meal] created some fantastic menus of food that can be extremely enjoyable. The great thing is that it’s also very healthy — all low in sodium and very balanced with all the diet requirements.”
Luca Parmitano bore Italy’s green, white, and red on his spacesuit on his left shoulder as he became the country’s first astronaut to walk in space. He joined Chris Cassidy on a mission that will prepare the $100 billion orbiting space-laboratory for a new Russian module. Spacewalk director David Korth of Nasa’s Johnson Space Center said that they will also focus on several maintenance and repair needs and explained that “these are just a mixture of different, unrelated tasks, for the most part, that we’re trying to burn down.”
According to Fox News, Cassidy’s tasks include routing power cables to support Russia’s Multipurpose Laboratory Module and replacing a communications controller unit which failed last December. Whereas Parmitano will be retrieving material experiments that will be brought back to Earth and taking photos of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer which was installed to detect antimatter in the quest to find the elusive dark matter which scientists believe accounts for a large part of the universes’s total mass.
