Astronauts to conduct second spacewalk in a week to finish power upgrades
NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Canadian Joshua Kutryk will exit the station on Nov. 5 to install the final new solar array.
Two astronauts will exit the International Space Station on Thursday for a second spacewalk in a week to complete a major power upgrade project. NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency are scheduled to begin their extravehicular activity at about 8:30 a.m. ET on Nov. 5. The operation is expected to last about seven hours, according to the agency. The pair will finish installing and deploying the final new solar array they began working on during a spacewalk on Oct. 29.
This venture, designated U.S. spacewalk 101, will be the 101st conducted by NASA astronauts and the 286th in the space station's history. It is the second of two spacewalks NASA planned for this fall to wrap up the power augmentation project. The new solar arrays will increase the station's power-generating capacity by 30 percent. NASA said the upgrades will also eventually assist in helping to deorbit the ISS when it is retired in a few years.
Menon and Kutryk previously worked together on the Oct. 29 spacewalk, which was Kutryk's first. Your Space Hamilton reported in October that Kutryk's spacewalk marked the first by a Canadian astronaut in seven years. The upcoming spacewalk will be the ninth of 2026 and the eighth this year to feature at least one U.S. astronaut. It follows a series of four spacewalks that took place between August and early September.
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NASA's live coverage of the event will begin at 7 a.m. ET on Nov. 5. The broadcast will be available to stream on the agency's free NASA+ app, as well as on Amazon Prime, discovery+, the social media site X and YouTube. Netflix, which provided coverage of a spacewalk in July, will not host a livestream this time. More than 290 spacefarers from 26 countries have visited the International Space Station, including 174 from the United States alone, according to NASA.
The International Space Station has been in low-Earth orbit for more than 25 years, typically about 260 miles high. It is operated through a global partnership of space agencies including NASA, Roscosmos, the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Throughout its lifespan, the station has served as a test bed for scientific research in microgravity and has in years past opened itself up to private commercial missions. Seven astronauts are currently living and working aboard the orbital laboratory. The most recent arrivals in early October included NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Kutryk and Russian cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. They are members of the Crew-13 mission, which launched to the station in a SpaceX Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Menon arrived at the station in mid-July with Russians Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina on a Roscosmos Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft for an eight-month mission.
With files from USA Today