Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Skripochka began a spacewalk on Monday from the International Space Station (ISS), RIA Novosti reported.
This is Yurchikhin's fifth spacewalk, and Skripochka's first.
During the six-hour spacewalk, the cosmonauts will remove the Kontur scientific experiment, which studied remote object control capability for robotic arms, from the Zvezda service module.
The mechanism, taken to the International Space Station in 2003, was initially used for experiments conducted by the German space agency DLR. The Russian stage of the experiment began in May 2008.
During the next stage of Russia's Kontur experiment, which will begin next year, cosmonauts will check whether robotic manipulators on the Earth could be controlled from the orbital station.
The cosmonauts will also carry out an experiment called Test, aimed at verifying the existence of micro organisms or contamination underneath insulation on the Russian segment of the ISS.
Yurchikhin and Skripochka will also install a portable multipurpose workstation on the Zvezda module and carry out a number of other operations at the ISS.