Two NASA astronauts are conducting a spacewalk outside the International Space Station on today (June 15), and you can watch the excursion live.
Woody Hoburg and Stephen Bowen were scheduled to begin their spacewalk Thursday at 8:55 a.m. EDT (1255 GMT). They’ll spend about six hours installing a roll-out solar array on the exterior of the International Space Station.
You can watch the extravehicular activity (EVA) live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the space agency. Coverage began at 7:30 a.m. EDT (1130 GMT).
Related: International Space Station: Facts about the orbital laboratory
This will be the second spacewalk for Hoburg and Bowen in less than a week. The duo installed one of the solar arrays, known as iROSAs (short for “ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays”) during a six-hour EVA on June 9.
That was Hoburg’s first-ever spacewalk and the ninth for Bowen, who has now spent nearly 60.5 hours working in the vacuum of space across his four career spaceflights. Only four spaceflyers have more total EVA time to their names.
The iROSAs will augment rather than replace the station’s current energy-production system. The entire complement of new arrays will boost the outpost’s electricity generation by about 30%, NASA officials have said.
Two Russian cosmonauts are getting ready for a spacewalk of their own next week. Sergey Prokopyev, commander of the station’s current Expedition 69, and Dmitri Petelin are scheduled to venture outside the Russian segment of the ISS on June 22.
During that EVA, Prokopyev and Peteline will “spend about seven hours replacing communications and science hardware and photographing the condition of the Zvezda service module,” NASA officials wrote in an update Wednesday (June 14).
