Two NASA astronauts will perform the fourth-ever women’s spacewalk on Wednesday (November 1), and you can watch the event live.
Loral O’Hara and Jasmine Moghbeli are scheduled to exit the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday at 8:05 a.m. EDT (1205 GMT) for a spacewalk lasting about seven hours.
Watch it live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA, OR Directly through the agency. Coverage will begin at 6:30 a.m. EST (1030 GMT).
Related: Spacewalks: how they work and key landmarks
“They will remove an electronic box called the radio frequency array that was part of the communications antenna system,” NASA officials wrote in a letter to O’Hara and Moghbeli. Updated Monday (October 30).
“They will also replace one of the 12 bearing assemblies on the station’s Alpha Solar rotary joint,” they added. “The bearings enable the station’s solar arrays to track the sun.”
The duo’s flight was originally scheduled to take place on October 20, but was postponed after an ammonia refrigerant leak was discovered in the spare cooler of the Russian Nauka unit on October 9.
Two astronauts conducted a spacewalk on October 25 to search for the source of the leak and perform other tasks. Their observations could help Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency, determine the cause of the leak and figure out how to restart the coolant. (Nauka’s main cooler continues to work well, and there is no risk to astronauts aboard the International Space Station, NASA and Roscosmos officials said.)
There have been only three all-female spacewalks so far, all by the same two people — NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, who made the trips in 2019 and 2020.
But NASA confirmed that Koch, Meir, O’Hara and Mogbeli will not remain outliers forever.
Wednesday’s spacewalk “will not be the last as we continue to live and work in space,” agency officials told Space.com via email earlier this month.
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