On Monday (February 1), two NASA astronauts departed together for their second space stack to tackle the battery and camera upgrades at the International Space Station.
NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover, who arrived at the space station on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft in November and completed their first spacewalk together on Wednesday (January 27), are scheduled to leave the station by the Quest airlock about 07:05 AM EST (1205 GMT) and will work for about 6.5 hours in the airspace of space.
NASA TV provides live coverage of the spacewalk preparations at 05:30 EST (1030 GMT). You can watch it live here on Space.com, with permission from NASA TV, or directly through the agency’s website.
Related: Spacewalk photos: the International Space Station gets a power upgrade
Hopkins and Glover will undertake various tasks during this spacewalk, including installing a new high-definition camera in the Destiny lab and replacing another camera on the station’s starboard. The space walkers will also install a final lithium-ion battery to fold into a large power station of the space station that began in 2017.
After Hopkins and Glover emerge from the Quest airlock, the spacewalkers’ first task is to go over the space station’s Port-4 (P4) structure, where they will install an adapter plate for the new lithium-ion battery. The battery was pre-installed at the P4 truss by the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm, NASA officials wrote in an ISS blog.
When the battery is finished, the astronauts will spin to the other side of the lab to replace high-definition cameras on the starboard side. The spacewalkers will also route Ethernet cables to the starboard knob before heading to Japan’s Kibo lab to install a “pole vision” camera on Kibo’s 33-meter (10-meter) robotic arm.
Related: The International Space Station: inside and outside (infographic)
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Monday’s spacewalk will be the fourth spacewalk in Hopkins’ career and the second for Glover. Hopkins will be named as extra crew member 1 (EV-1), meaning he will wear the space suit with red stripes and be the first to leave the air. As EV-2, Glover will wear the usual white suit without stripes.
NASA plans two more spacewalks “in the near future,” the agency said in a statement. After Monday’s spacewalk, Glover and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins will prepare the space station for new solar power plants that will be installed at the station later this year. After that, Rubins will continue for the fourth spacewalk of 2021 with astronaut Soichi Noguchi, the Japanese space agency (JAXA), to ‘continue upgrading station parts’, NASA said in the statement.
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