NASA astronaut Nicole Mann and Japan’s Koichi Wakata will make the second spacewalk of 2023 on Thursday morning (Feb. 2), and you may watch the motion reside.
The 2 International Space Station (ISS) astronauts are scheduled to modify their spacesuits to battery energy at 8:15 a.m. EST (1315 GMT) on Thursday. They’re going to exit the station’s Quest airlock shortly thereafter, kicking off a roughly seven-hour spacewalk.
Watch the extravehicular exercise reside right here at House.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency (opens in new tab). Protection will begin Thursday at 6:45 a.m. EST (1145 GMT).
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Mann and Wakata will make their technique to the starboard a part of the orbiting lab’s truss construction, a sequence of segments that function attachment factors for solar arrays, warmth radiators and exterior payloads on the ISS.
“As soon as they arrive on the Starboard-4 truss, they may full a modification package set up job they started on Jan. 20 to organize the station for its subsequent roll-out solar array,” NASA officers wrote in a blog post on Wednesday (opens in new tab) (Feb. 1).
So far, spacewalking astronauts have put in 4 out of six of those new arrays, that are often known as iROSAs (“ISS Roll-Out Photo voltaic Arrays”). Getting all six up and operating will enhance the station’s energy provide by 20% to 30%, NASA officers have stated. (iROSAs are augmenting, not changing, the present ISS solar panel system.)
Because the Wednesday weblog put up famous, Mann and Wakata acquired some iROSA prep work achieved throughout a spacewalk on Jan. 20. Nevertheless, the duo bumped into a number of minor points that day and weren’t in a position to end assembling an iROSA mounting platform as deliberate.
The 2 astronauts are a part of SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission for NASA, which arrived on the ISS in October 2022. Two different spaceflyers are a part of that mission as nicely: NASA’s Josh Cassada and Anna Kikina, of the Russian space company Roscosmos.
A total of seven astronauts are at present dwelling aboard the ISS. The Crew-5 quartet are joined in orbit by NASA’s Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin.
This trio got here to the station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in September 2022 and have been scheduled to depart subsequent month. Nevertheless, they’re now prone to remain aboard the ISS for a full year, because of an apparent micrometeoroid strike in December that rendered their Soyuz unfit to hold them again to Earth.
Mike Wall is the writer of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a guide concerning the seek for alien life. Comply with him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Comply with us @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab), Facebook (opens in new tab) and Instagram (opens in new tab).
