Two NASA astronauts will conduct a spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Tuesday morning (March 15), and you can watch it live.
Kayla Barron and Raja Chari are scheduled to step outside the orbiting lab Tuesday at 8:05 a.m. EDT (1205 GMT), kicking off a roughly 6.5-hour spacewalk designed to help pave the way for upcoming solar array upgrades.
You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency. Coverage will begin at 6:30 a.m. EDT (1030 GMT).
Spacewalks: How they work and major milestones
Barron and Chari will depart via the station’s Quest airlock. Barron will serve as extravehicular crewmember 1 and wear a spacesuit with red stripes; Chari will be extravehicular crewmember 2 and wear a suit with no stripes.
The duo will “translate over to the Starboard-4 truss structure and install modification kits that will ready the space station for its third roll-out solar array,” NASA officials wrote in a blog post Monday (March 14).
Two of a planned six ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays, or iROSAs, have been deployed on the station so far. The next two are scheduled to come up to the orbiting lab on a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule this fall, NASA officials said during a press conference on Monday.
The installation of all six iROSAs will boost the space station’s total available power from 160 kilowatts to 215 kilowatts.
Tuesday’s spacewalk will be the second for Barron and the first for Chari.
NASA has another spacewalk planned for March 23, involving crewmembers to be named later. Next week’s extravehicular activity is devoted to a variety of maintenance work, including the installation of new hoses in the system that routes ammonia through the station’s heat-expelling radiators.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook.
