On August 15, 2018, Russian cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Sergey Prokopiev performed the extra vehicle activities (EVA – spacewalk). The cosmonauts hand-released four tiny CubeSats and installed hardware for a German experiment to track animal migration. The EVA lasted 7 hours and 46 minutes. It was the 3rd EVA for Artemyev and the 1st for Prokopiev. It was the 212th spacewalk dedicated to assembly and maintenance of the International Space Station since 1998, and the 55th staged from the station’s Russian segment.

On August 12, 2018 at 07:31 UTC the "Delta-4 Heavy” rocket-carrier was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The launch was performed by the United Launch Alliance. The rocket orbited NASA’s Parker Solar Probe on a daring seven-year mission. The goal is to help scientists figure out what makes the corona hotter than the sun’s visible surface and what accelerates charged particles to enormous velocities, producing the solar wind that streams away from the corona in all directions.