This week holds another exciting event at the International Space Station (ISS) as two NASA astronauts will head out on a six-and-a-half-hour long spacewalk this Thursday, January 30. This is the second U.S. spacewalk this year, and preparations are underway to get the astronauts, their spacesuits, and the station ready for the event.
It will be NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams performing the spacewalk, who gained worldwide fame after traveling to the space station on a Boeing Starliner spacecraft on what was supposed to be a one-week mission. The pair have now been in space for over six months, as issues with the Starliner meant that it returned to Earth without them, and they joined the regular ISS crew.
As part of their ISS crew duties, they will now be heading out of one of the ISS’s airlocks to perform maintenance and sample collection work on the exterior of the station. One job they’ll need to complete is removing a radio frequency group antenna assembly that’s no longer required from the station’s exterior, and they also aim to prepare a joint for the station’s robotic arm in case it needs replacing in the future. Another job on the list is collecting samples from the surfaces of the Destiny laboratory and the Quest airlock, to see whether these surfaces have microbes on them.
If you want to see a technical breakdown of the tasks they’ll be performing, NASA has an animation showing the plans for the spacewalk:
As for the spacewalk itself, if you’d like to watch along with the event, it will be livestreamed on NASA’s streaming service, NASA+. Coverage begins at 6:30 a.m. ET on Thursday, with the spacewalk itself beginning at 8 a.m. ET.
This event is a follow-up to a previous spacewalk on January 16 this year, when two astronauts repaired an X-ray telescope on the station’s exterior. That pair included Williams, along with her NASA colleague Nick Hague. During that event Hague captured an incredible photo showing the 250 mile drop from space down to the Earth’s surface:
Here is another view of last week's spacewalk – I see this photo and think, wow, that is a 250-mile drop! pic.twitter.com/EMc6ia7Ufl
— Nick Hague (@AstroHague) January 24, 2025
These two January spacewalks are the first following a six-month break, as there were issues with a water leak in a spacesuit from June 2024 that lead to spacewalk activities being suspended. Fortunately there were no issues with the spacesuits during the January 16 event, so everything looks good for the second spacewalk to go ahead as planned this week.
