Stunning images of astronaut deploying nanosatellite into space

Flight Engineers Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev from Russia completed a 5 hour and 11 minute spacewalk on Monday and part of the excursion was manually putting a nanosatellite dubbed Chasqui 1 into orbit - and it was all captured in stunning images.

[Image Source: Oleg Artemyev]

'Shortly after the spacewalk began at 10:02 a.m., Artemyev manually deployed Chasqui 1, a Peruvian nanosatellite designed to take pictures of the Earth with a pair of cameras and transmit the images to a ground station' reports a NASA statement. It will serve as part of a research project at the National University of Engineering in Peru which is looking into gaining experience with satellite technology.

Check out the images below which are somewhat reminiscent of the 'Companion Cube' scene from Portal:

[Image Source: Oleg Artemyev]

[Image Source: Oleg Artemyev]

[Image Source: Oleg Artemyev]

[Image Source: Oleg Artemyev]

The rest of the mission was spent on a mixture of other missions such as installing the EXPOSE-R2 experiment package which investigates into organisms that are tolerant of environmental extremes. They also installed other experimental packages and performed maintenance and inspection on the exterior of the ISS, the 181st spacewalk in support of the ISS.