Intensely focused and tethered to a floating laboratory in the vacuum of space, two astronauts spent over 6 hours working on the International Space Station during a historic spacewalk.
What is it?
Two astronauts aboard the ISS set out on a spacewalk recently (Aug. 18). European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and NASA astronaut Anil Menon set out recently a historic spacewalk.
This was Adenot’s first spacewalk and, in journeying out into the darkness of space she became the first French woman to conduct a spacewalk (or, formally, an extravehicular activity, or EVA).
In this snapshot from the space station, you can see Adenot on the left and Menon on the right, both hard at work on their mission.
On this spacewalk, which took the pair 6 hours and 23 minutes, the astronauts were tasked with removing a failed antenna from the space station. However, while it was a successful outing, the pair didn’t have enough time to replace the old antenna with a new, working one.
Why is it incredible?
Getting to space is hard enough. And then once you’re there, venturing out of an orbiting laboratory into the darkness of space to do a physically demanding but technically complex repair job on that laboratory is certainly no picnic.
But these two astronauts pushed through almost six-and-a-half hours of grueling space work to remove the broken antenna before running out of time. And this big step forward in this fix is critical, as these antennae help to connect the space station to Earth, which is of the utmost importance.
The antenna, a “Space-to-Ground” antenna, started malfunctioning months ago and a second antenna has temporarily taken over. But this solution was temporary and a more permanent replacement was needed as this antenna ensures that astronauts on the space station can quickly transmit critical information back down to Mission Control back on Earth.