Extra-vehicular activity
Extra-vehicular activity (EVA) is work done by an astronaut away from the earth outside of the
spacecraft: in
space flight or while on the Moon (see
List of lunar astronauts) or possibly in the future on another planet or moon. In the early days of space flight it was called 'space walk'. The first EVA was carried out by
Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov on
March 18 1965 from the
Voskhod 2 spacecraft. The first woman to perform an EVA was Cosmonaut
Svetlana Savitskaya on
July 25,
1984 while she was aboard the
Salyut 7 space station.
An EVA is dangerous business for a number of different reasons. The primary one is collision with debris. Orbital velocity at 300km above the Earth (typical for a Space Shuttle mission) is 7.7km/sec. This is 10 times the speed of a bullet, so the kinetic energy of a particle as small as a fleck of paint or a grain of sand is equal to that of a bullet with a mass that is 100 times as large! Every space mission creates more orbiting debris, so this problem will continue to become worse.
Scientists are developing tele-operated robots for outside construction work, to eliminate the need for EVAs.
See also:
External link
Also name of mechas in
Neon Genesis Evangelion.