Russian Man Becomes World's Oldest Spacewalker Today: Watch Him Live (Livestream)

Pavel Vinogradov became the world's oldest spacewalker today when he joined his countryman outside the International Space Station in order to conduct maintenance work. Starting at 10:03 a.m. EDT, the two Russians plan to stay outside the station for about six hours.

Vinogradov has been a cosmonaut for two decades. At 59 years old, he worked with the much-younger, 41-year-old Roman Romanenko to install new science equipment, work on gathering old experiments and replacing a navigation device.

Clad in their bulky Orlan spacesuits in order to protect themselves against the harsh environment of space, the cosmonauts first worked on the installation of a new Russian experiment called Obstanovka. This will measure how charged particles interact with a variety of materials kept outside of the space station. It could give researchers new insights about how space weather affects the ionosphere, an active region of the Earth's atmosphere, according to Space.com.

"All this is hard work," said Romanenko of the spacewalk in a NASA interview. "Also, I'm supposed to collect information from other experiments that were installed outside the station."

Romanenko is actually a second-generation cosmonaut. His father, Yuri Romanenko, performed spacewalks in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet this is the younger man's first experience on his own spacewalk.

Vinogradov, in costrast, is a veteran. This is his seventh spacewalk, his first occurring in 1997 at Russia's old Mir space station following a cargo ship collision. He will turn 60 aboard the space station this summer, according to Fox News.

In addition to installing the new experiment, the two men will also replace a faulty retro-reflector device that's needed to guide the upcoming arrival of the European Space Agency's Automated Transfer Vehicle 4. This unmanned cargo ship will launch in June and park itself at the space station.

This is the 167^th spacewalk to have occurred in support of space station assembly and maintenance. It's the first of as many as six Russian spacewalks that are planned for this year.

You can watch the spacewalk, yourself. Check out the livestream below, originally appearing here.

Live stream videos at Ustream