The Olympic Torch Undergoes its First Spacewalk

The Olympic torch completed its first-ever spacewalk Saturday when two Russian cosmonauts clad in spacesuits handed it off to one another prior to performing maintenance on the International Space Station (ISS).

Expedition 37 Flight Engineers Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy stepped out of the space station and into space around 9:30 a.m. wielding the torch as part of the outerspace leg of its relay leading up to the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. The spacewalk was Kotov's fourth and Ryazanskiy's first.

"Our goal here is to make it look spectacular," Kotov told reporters before his mission began, according to Reuters. "We'd like to showcase our Olympic torch in space ... Millions of people will see it live on TV and they will see the station and see how we work."

Despite having visited space in 1996 and 2000, the torch had never been taken on a spacewalk prior to Saturday. It arrived at the ISS just days before aboard a Russian spacecraft carrying three new crew members.

Expedition Flight Engineers Mikhail Tyurin, Rick Mastracchio and Koichi Wakata joined the six cosmonauts already aboard the station just before 8:00 a.m. EST on Thursday, having docked roughly two and a half hours before. The trio's arrival marked the first time since October 2009 that nine people have occupied the ISS in the absence of a space shuttle.

Come Sunday, however, Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineers Karen Nyberg and Luca Parmitano will return to Earth, taking the torch with them.

In all, 174 spacewalks have been performed in order to perform space station maintenance or assembly, eight of which have been carried out this year.