Two astronauts are preparing to finish a multiyear effort to modernize the power system of the International Space Station with a spacewalk scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. EST. NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Canadian astronaut Joshua Kutryk will install the eighth and final iROSA solar array, which is expected to lift the station's electrical capacity from about 160 kilowatts to roughly 215 kilowatts, an increase of around 30 percent.
The excursion is planned to last about seven hours. Space.com is offering live coverage of the walk through NASA's broadcast feed, allowing viewers to follow the work as it happens outside the orbiting laboratory.
The job continues a sequence of installations that began well before this week. The seventh array was fitted during a spacewalk on Oct. 29, an outing that also marked the 100th U.S. spacewalk conducted from the station. That same excursion was the first Canadian spacewalk since 2019, underlining the international makeup of the crews that maintain the complex.
The upgrade project started in June 2021 and has taken more than five years to complete. Extra power matters for the research carried out aboard the station, which relies on electricity for experiments, life support and the systems that keep its six current occupants, including three cosmonauts, working. The Crew-13 mission, launched on a SpaceX spacecraft and arriving Oct. 1, brought additional people to the outpost as the upgrades moved forward.