Two Russian astronauts, Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky, have just successfully completed the firstEVA spacewalk of 2025.
After more than 6 hours of intense work in a harsh space environment, they returned to the International Space Station (ISS). The trip, expected to last five and 38 minutes, and eventually took six and 11 minutes to complete, showing the complexity of the assigned tasks.
The focus of this walk is a landmark mission: Setting up a special equipment for the Ekran-M experiment outside the Russian Nauka multi-purpose laboratory modular.
This is not a normal maintenance task, but the first step in an ambitious project to produce high-tech materials right in the universe.
"Ekran-M" is a groundbreaking scientific experiment, with the goal of "growing" semiconductor crystals in the almost perfect vacuum environment of space.
On Earth, the production of chips and semiconductor components is always affected by 2 factors: Gasoline and impurities in the air. findings can cause extremely small defects in the crystal structure of materials, while impurities reduce purity. Both of these factors reduce the performance of the final product.
In contrast, the microgravity and khong gian environment is an ideal condition for creating crystals with extremely high purity and a nearly perfect structure.
These perfect materials are expected to create a revolution in the electronics industry. They can be used to produce new-generation chips and components, with superior performance for computers, telecommunications equipment and other high-tech industries.
In addition to starting the "Ekran-M" experiment, the two astronauts have completed a series of other important auxiliary tasks. They dismantled an old high-resolution camera from the Zvezda modular - a task that required skill and precision. In addition, they also cleaned one of the windows of this modular to ensure observation quality and removed a cassette box containing old experimental samples from the Poisk modular.
This is just the beginning, said Dmitry Akhmerov, chief engineer at RSC energy and missile corporation. The Russian space explorers are expected to make another spacewalk in just the next two weeks. "They will rest and re-analyze the work they have just done. After that, we will start preparing for the next walk," he said.
