Watch 2 astronauts perform 1st spacewalk of 2023 on Friday

January 20, 2023

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Two astronauts will conduct the primary spacewalk of 2023 on Friday morning (Jan. 20), and you may watch the motion dwell.

NASA’s Nicole Mann and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Company are scheduled to step exterior the International Space Station (ISS) at 8:15 a.m. EST (1315 GMT) on Friday, kicking off a roughly 6.5-hour-long spacewalk.

Watch it dwell right here at House.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency (opens in new tab). Protection will begin at 7 a.m. EST (1200 GMT).

Associated: The most memorable spacewalks of all time in pictures

NASA astronaut Josh Cassada throughout a spacewalk exterior the Worldwide House Station. (Picture credit score: NASA)

Mann and Wakata “will work on the far finish of the station’s starboard truss construction of their EMUs and set up a modification equipment enabling the long run set up of a roll-out solar array,” NASA officers wrote in a blog post on Thursday (opens in new tab) (Jan. 19). (EMU is brief for “Extravehicular Mobility Unit,” the kind of cumbersome spacesuit every astronaut will put on on Friday’s tour.)

Friday’s spacewalk continues ongoing work to put in six ISS Roll-Out Photo voltaic Arrays (iROSAs), that are designed to enhance the orbiting lab’s energy provide.

Spacewalking astronauts have put in 4 of six deliberate iROSAs to this point. When all six are operational, the space station’s energy output will improve by 20% to 30%, NASA officers have mentioned.

Wakata and Mann got here as much as the ISS in October on SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission, together with NASA’s Josh Cassada and Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina.

The Crew-5 quartet at present shares the ISS with three different spaceflyers — NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin. Rubio, Prokopyev and Petelin arrived in September aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft referred to as MS-22, which leaked away its coolant last month after an obvious micrometeoroid or particles strike.

The MS-22 automobile now is not match to return astronauts to Earth besides in case of emergency. So Russia’s federal space company, Roscosmos, plans to launch an uncrewed Soyuz to the orbiting lab subsequent month to carry Rubio, Prokopyev and Petelin residence.

However that return journey will not happen in March, as initially deliberate; the trio will seemingly continue living aboard the ISS until September or so, NASA officers have mentioned.

Mike Wall is the writer of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a e-book in regards to the seek for alien life. Observe him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Observe us @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab), Facebook (opens in new tab) and Instagram (opens in new tab).