WASHINGTON, Nov. 15 (Xinhua) -- Two astronauts started on Friday a series of complex spacewalks outside the International Space Station to repair a cosmic particle detector in searching for dark matter and antimatter.
European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano and U.S. space agency NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan switched their spacesuits to battery power at 6:39 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time (1139 GMT) to kick off a series of complex spacewalks to replace a cooling system on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a cosmic ray detector.
The upgraded cooling system will support AMS, launched in 2011, through the lifetime of the space station.
The spacewalks are considered the most complex of their kind since the Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions, which took place between 1993 and 2009, according to NASA.
