The torch for the 2014 Winter Olympics in the Russian city of Sochi has started its first space walk.

Nasa Live TV showed Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergei Ryazanskiy carrying the unlit Olympic torch outside the International Space Station on Saturday.

The torch was launched into space from the Russian-operated Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Thursday morning. It will return to Earth with a three-man crew on Monday.

The torch will not burn aboard the space outpost because lighting it would consume precious oxygen and pose a threat to the crew.

The Olympic torch was taken aboard the US space shuttle Atlantis in 1996 for the Atlanta Summer Olympics, but this is the first it time it has been taken outside a spacecraft.

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