• Astroluca's fourth spacewalk

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January 25, 2020 The fourth and final spacewalk of the Beyond mission was also a success, at the end of which the astronaut Luca Parmitano conquered a new record: after being the first Italian commander of the Station and the first non-American astronaut to having led an extra-vehicular activity, AstroLuca is now the astronaut of the European Space Agency (ESA) to have spent the longest time outside the Space Station.

"After the five hours and two minutes spent today outside the orbital station, AstroLuca officially holds the European record for the longest cumulative time spent on spacewalks. Congratulations Luca!", Wrote ESA in a tweet. A record that falls like a cherry on the cake at the end of another acrobatic exit to bring back the antimatter hunter Ams (Alpha Magnetic Spectometer), the gigantic instrument installed outside the orbital station that sieves cosmic rays in search of never seen particles. Now for the astronaut of the European Space Agency (ESA) it is time to think about returning home: his return is very close and on February 6 the Russian shuttle Soyuz will bring him back to Earth, in the steppe of Kazakhstan.

"It was a great success," physicist Roberto Battiston of the University of Trento told Ansa who collaborated in the design and implementation of the CERN instrument with Nobel laureate Samuel Ting. Cern of Geneva himself and NASA are satisfied with the work done by AtroLuca and his colleague Andrew Morgan, from NASA.

This time it was Morgan who led the extravehicular activity, but it was still Parmitano to reach the AMS as an acrobat, flying on the Space Station anchored only with his feet to the Canadarm robotic arm. The goal was to complete the installation of the new AMS cooling pump. After reconnecting all the pipes that he had had to disconnect in the last spacewalk to place the new cooling pump, AstroLuca performed the tests to verify that the seal was perfect. In two cases he encountered small leaks and had to solve the problem. He then replaced all the external layers necessary to protect the instrument and, after more than five hours of work, he finally returned to the hatch of the Space Station.