Russian cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, on his first spacewalk of 2026 on the International Space Station (ISS), sent a message to his mother.
Current ISS commander Kud-Sverchkov and his fellow cosmonaut Sergey Mikayev were performing scheduled installation and removal of scientific experiment hardware on the outer hull of the space station on Wednesday.
A stream of the spacewalk, broadcast by Russian space corporation Roscosmos, shows Kud-Sverchkov holding up a laminated piece of paper with the words “Mom, I’m wearing my hat” printed in Russian.
Over the course of more than six hours, the cosmonauts installed new hardware to observe the Sun in the previously unexplored terahertz range of the electromagnetic spectrum, and retrieved a slide from an experiment attempting to grow ultra-pure semiconductors in space.
They also uninstalled a container used to test whether bacteria, fungi, and plant seeds could survive five years exposed to vacuum, cosmic radiation, and temperature fluctuations.
Kud-Sverchkov and Mikayev were launched to the ISS alongside NASA astronaut Chris Williams aboard the Russian Soyuz MS-28 in last November. Kud-Sverchkov then took over command of the ISS Expedition 74 from NASA astronaut Mike Fincke.