A Russian spacewalk kicked off the station's work week and was the second trip outside for two Russian flight engineers.
Cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev worked quickly in the vacuum of space, getting all their tasks done in just five hours and eleven minutes. The pair swapped out a number of experiments that live outside the station, some of which are looking at how different materials hold up when exposed to the harsh environment of space. They also deployed a small Peruvian satellite called Chasqui-1 which will orbit the Earth and take images of the ground below.
Also taking flight this week from the ISS was Planet Labs' latest flock of satellites known as Dove sats.
This fleet of 28 small satellites deployed from the Japanese module's airlock. While in orbit, they'll capture frequent high resolution images of the Earth's surface that are made available to everyone through planet-labs.com. The pictures can be used for everything from monitoring deforestation and the ice caps to helping with disaster relief.
And always ready to share their own views from the station, the Expedition 40 crew caught some fantastic images of the Cygnus spacecraft's fiery re-entry.
Crew members Alexander Gerst and Max Suraev captured these images on Sunday while the unmanned cargo craft was breaking up in the earth's atmosphere, marking a successful end to orbital sciences' second resupply mission.
This week's twitter question comes from Marianna who asks: "Do all crew members do a spacewalk in the six months they're on ISS?"
As much as they'd all like to, not every crew member gets to go on a spacewalk.
However they all get training in NASA's neutral buoyancy laboratory before flying, just in case they get the call to head outside to perform any major repairs. And there certainly hasn't been a lack of spacewalks in the station's history. In the almost 14 years since humans arrived onboard, they have racked up over 1,100 hours across 181 spacewalks to build and maintain the ISS.
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