Two NASA astronauts will float outdoors the Worldwide House Station as we speak to arrange the orbiting lab for brand spanking new photo voltaic wings and you may watch it reside on-line.
Astronauts Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio will step outdoors the house station as we speak, Nov. 15, at 8 a.m. EST 1300 GMT) on the primary of three deliberate spacewalks to put in the brand new photo voltaic arrays. For each astronauts, it is going to be the primary spacewalk of their spaceflight careers.
NASA will broadcast the Worldwide House Station spacewalk on-line beginning at 6:30 a.m. EST (1130 GMT) and you may watch it reside within the video feed above.
Associated: Essentially the most memorable spacewalks of all time in footage
If all goes properly, Cassada and Rubio will spend seven hours working outdoors the house station. Their main objective is to put in a mounting bracket on the starboard aspect of the station’s backbone-like predominant truss that would be the basis for a brand new Worldwide House Station Rollout Photo voltaic Array (iRosa), a photo voltaic panel designed to rollout like a window shade to generate energy.
“These would be the third and fourth iROSAs out of a complete six deliberate for set up,” NASA wrote in a assertion (opens in new tab). “The iROSAs will improve energy technology functionality by as much as 30%, growing the station’s whole accessible energy from 160 kilowatts to as much as 215 kilowatts.”
The bracket and different gear for the spacewalk arrived on the house station final week on a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo ship that launched on Nov. 7. The iRosa photo voltaic arrays themselves will launch to the station Nov. 21 on a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship, NASA has mentioned.
As soon as the mounting bracket is put in, station astronauts will carry out extra U.S.-led spacewalks on Nov. 28 and Dec. 1 to finish the set up of iRosa photo voltaic arrays for the station’s 3A and 4A energy channels.
Cassada and Rubio will not be the one station crewmembers taking a spacewalk this week.
On Thursday (Nov. 17), Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin will take their very own spacewalk to work on the outside of the station’s Russian-built Nauka laboratory module. The cosmonauts will spend about seven hours working to arrange a radiator on the station’s Rassvet module for a transfer to the Nauka lab.
That spacewalk may also be webcast reside on-line by NASA, starting at 9 a.m. EST (1400 GMT) on Thursday.
E mail Tariq Malik at [email protected] (opens in new tab) or observe him @tariqjmalik (opens in new tab). Comply with us @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab), Fb (opens in new tab) and Instagram (opens in new tab).
