On Monday (Feb. 1), two NASA astronauts will set out together for their second spacewalk to tackle battery and camera upgrades on 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 exit the station through the Quest airlock at 7:05 a.m. EST (1205 GMT) and will operate in the vacuum of space for approximately 6.5 hours.
NASA TV will provide live coverage of preparations for the spacewalk starting at 5:30 a.m. EST (1030 GMT). You can watch it live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV, or directly from the agency’s website.
Related: Spacewalk Photos: International Space Station is getting a power upgrade
Hopkins and Glover will perform a variety of tasks during this spacewalk, including installing a new high-definition camera at the Destiny lab and replacing another camera on the station’s starboard bilge. The spacewalkers will also install one last lithium-ion battery to complete a major upgrade to the space station that began in 2017.
After Hopkins and Glover emerge from the Quest airlock, the spacewalkers’ first task is to cross the Space Station’s Port-4 (P4) truss 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 ready, the astronauts move to the other side of the orbit lab to replace high-definition cameras on the starboard bilge. The spacewalkers will also run some Ethernet cables to the starboard bilge before going to Japan’s Kibo lab to install a “wrist vision” camera on Kibo’s 10-meter robotic arm.
Related: The International Space Station: Inside and Out (infographic)
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Monday’s spacewalk will be the fourth spacewalk in Hopkins’ career and the second for Glover. Hopkins is designated Extravehicular Crew Member 1 (EV-1), meaning he will wear the red-striped spacesuit and be the first to exit the airlock. As EV-2, Glover wears the plain white suit without stripes.
NASA is planning two more spacewalks “in the near future,” the agency said in a statement. Following Monday’s spacewalk, Glover and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins will prepare the space station for new solar panels to be installed on the station later this year on the next spacewalk. For the fourth spacewalk of 2021, Rubins will depart with Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi to “continue to upgrade station components,” NASA said in the statement.
E-mail Hanneke Weitering at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @hannekescience. follow us on twitter @RTLnews and on Facebook.