This Wednesday will see two astronauts head out from the International Space Station (ISS) on a spacewalk to work on station maintenance. NASA astronauts Loral O’Hara and Jasmin Moghbeli will be working together on a six-and-a-half hour mission to replace a bearing and remove a piece of equipment from the exterior of the station.
If you’re curious to see what a day’s maintenance work looks like when you live in space, then NASA will be streaming the entire spacewalk live on its NASA TV channel, and we have the details on how to watch below.
What to expect from the spacewalk
The spacewalk will take place on Wednesday, November 1. Moghbeli and O’Hara will be working “to remove an electronics box called the Radio Frequency Group from a communications antenna on station,” according to NASA, and “[t]hey also will replace one of 12 trundle bearing assemblies on a solar alpha rotary joint.” These joints are part of the system that points the station’s solar panels towards the sun, allowing the panels to absorb more energy from the sun’s rays by tilting them to track the sun as the station orbits the Earth.
The spacewalk had originally been planned for Monday, October 30, but it was rescheduled following a coolant leak. Earlier this month, a radiator on the Russian Nauka module began leaking coolant, the latest in a series of leaks affecting the station and the craft docked to it in recent months. NASA confirmed that the crew was in no danger, but the agency chose to rework its spacewalk schedule to avoid the possibility of getting any contamination in internal systems.
How to watch the spacewalk
The spacewalk will be liv-streamed on NASA TV, and you can watch it by either using the video embedded above or by heading to NASA’s YouTube page for the event. The coverage begins at 6:30 a.m. ET (3:30 a.m. PT) on Wednesday, November 1, and the spacewalk itself begins just after 8 a.m. ET (5 a.m. PT).
