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Two spacewalking astronauts will finish upgrading the International Space Station’s power system today (Nov. 5), and you can watch the action live.
NASA astronaut Anil Menon and the Canadian Space Agency‘s Joshua Kutryk will install the eighth and final International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array (iROSA) today, during a roughly seven-hour spacewalk that’s scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. EST (1330 GMT).
You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, beginning at 7 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT).
Today’s extravehicular activity (EVA) will be the second in a week for Menon and Kutryk, who installed the station’s seventh iROSA during an Oct. 29 spacewalk. That excursion was the 100th U.S. spacewalk from the ISS to date, and the first EVA for a Canadian astronaut since 2019.
Today’s spacewalk will wrap up an ambitious ISS power upgrade that has taken more than five years to pull off.
“The installation job will complete the years-long process that began in June 2021 to augment the space station’s power generating capacity from 160 kilowatts to about 215 kilowatts,” NASA officials wrote about the EVA in a blog post on Tuesday (Nov. 3). That’s a boost of about 30%.
Menon and Kutryk are currently sharing the ISS with five other astronauts — NASA’s Luke Delaney and Jessica Watkins and cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov, Anna Kikina and Sergey Teteryatnikov.
Delaney, Kutryk, Teteryatnikov and Watkins arrived at the ISS on Oct. 1, on SpaceX’s Crew-13 mission. Dubrov, Kikina and Menon got there in mid-July, aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
