ISS - Expedition 69 Mission patch.
April 24, 2023
Two astronauts on the Expedition 69 crew are gearing up for a spacewalk at the end of the week. Meanwhile, two cosmonauts are standing down after their spacewalk planned for Tuesday was postponed.
Flight Engineers Stephen Bowen of NASA and Sultan Alneyadi of UAE (United Arab Emirates) are preparing for a spacewalk scheduled for 9:15 a.m. EDT on Friday. The duo in their Extravehicular Mobility Units, or spacesuits, will spend about six-and-a-half hours in the vacuum of space continuing to upgrade the orbital outpost’s power generation system. International Space Station managers will appear on NASA TV, on the agency’s app and website, at 2 p.m. today to discuss Friday’s spacewalk.
Image above: Astronaut Stephen Bowen is pictured waving during the seventh spacewalk of his career on March 2, 2011. Image Credit: NASA.
The two astronauts spent the day checking their spacesuits for leaks and proper fit verification with assistance from NASA Flight Engineer Woody Hoburg. Hoburg, along with NASA Flight Engineer Frank Rubio, will assist the astronauts in and out of their spacesuits and monitor their spacewalk. Alneyadi also wore a set of virtual reality goggles and trained for a variety of unlikely spacewalking rescue scenarios.
International Space Station (ISS). Animation Credit: ESA
Meanwhile, another spacewalk that was planned for Tuesday has been postponed until early May. Commander Sergey Prokopyev and Flight Engineer Dmitri Petelin , with assistance from European robotic arm operator and Flight Engineer Andrey Fedyaev, were due to move an experiment airlock from the Rassvet module to the Nauka science module. That work has been pushed back several days while ground controllers study the procedures planned for the spacewalk.
Related article (NASA):
NASA Sets Coverage of Spacewalk, News Conference for Station Upgrades
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-sets-coverage-of-spacewalk-news-conference-for-station-upgrades
Related links:
NASA TV: https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive
Expedition 69: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition69/index.html
Rassvet module: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/rassvet
Nauka multipurpose laboratory module: https://www.roscosmos.ru/tag/nauka/
Space Station Research and Technology: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/overview.html
International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html
Image (mentioned), Animation (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Mark Garcia.
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