Two astronauts will conduct history’s sixth all-female spacewalk today (Sept. 1), and you can watch it live.
NASA’s Jessica Meir and Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency will venture outside the International Space Station (ISS) at around 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT) on an excursion expected to last about 6.5 hours.
You can watch it here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency. Coverage will start at 7:00 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT).
During today’s spacewalk, Meir and Adenot “will replace a retroreflector on the forward port of the space station’s Harmony module to support spacecraft navigation during rendezvous and docking operations,” NASA officials said in a media advisory.
“After installing the reflector, the crew will work to install jumper cables for the data-relay systems, prepare the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer’s radiator for future maintenance, and replace a high-definition camera on the station’s truss,” they added.
(The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is a $2 billion particle physics experiment mounted to the exterior of the ISS that studies cosmic rays and hunts for mysterious dark matter, among other tasks.)
Adenot will be “crew member 1” on today’s spacewalk and will wear a suit with red stripes, NASA officials said. Meir will wear an unmarked suit and serve as “crew member 2.”
It will be the third spacewalk for Adenot, who two weeks ago became the first French woman ever to perform an extravehicular activity (EVA). It will be the seventh for Meir, which will put her third among female NASA astronauts behind Peggy Whitson (10 EVAs) and Suni Williams (nine).
There have been just five all-female ISS spacewalks to date, and Meir has been part of three of them — the first three, in fact. She conducted those with fellow NASA astronaut (and Artemis II crewmember) Christina Koch on Oct. 18, 2019, Jan. 15, 2020 and Jan. 20, 2020.
