Combustion scientist Jenni Sidey-Gibbons will celebrate her fifth anniversary as an astronaut selectee this summer, while assisting with a key upgrade of the space station.
Sidey-Gibbons was selected as an astronaut candidate in July 2017 and, along with the rest of her “Turtles” class, graduated in January 2020 with a suite of basic astronaut skills that qualify her for an eventual mission.
None of the four Canadian astronauts have been assigned to a new mission officially, although Canada is committed to flying a person aboard Artemis 2 – the first moon-landing mission, set for no earlier than 2025 – and to having at least one more astronaut visit the International Space Station.
But Sidey-Gibbons and the others are all busy with supporting other missions and keeping up their basic training. In the case of Sidey-Gibbons, she will be playing a key ground role in assisting with solar array deployments on the ISS.
“I had a pretty heavy involvement with the development of the spacewalks to roll out new iROSA [ISS Roll-Out Solar Array] arrays in the spring,” Sidey-Gibbons told SpaceQ. That work is part of a years-long series of power upgrades to the space station for science, including batteries and other solar array deployments, “that are going to dominate a lot of our work on orbit for the next coming years,” she added.
Space station crews have been doing a series of battery installations and solar array deployments in recent years to keep the station going for a potential extension until 2030. That extension is not agreed upon by the various partners, who are committed to 2024.
NASA is ready to do the extension, but must convince the other participants – including Canada – to go forward with this. That negotiation just got more complicated amid recent sanctions with Russia affecting other sectors of their space industry; that said, NASA maintains that ISS relations are proceeding as usual.
Astronauts are going ahead with the deployments now to meet NASA’s aims to have more space station science and commercial science in the coming years. For example, the Axiom 1 mission with Canadian Mark Pathy is expected to dock in April for an eight-day mission aboard ISS, foreshadowing other activities by Axiom including a series of modules later in the 2020s.
As for the power, the iROSAs are designed to lay on top of the current solar arrays. The current ISS arrays have a 15-year lifespan, but are still operating well beyond their expected expiry dates. When the new arrays and the old arrays are used together, they will eventually boost the station’s output by 20% to 30%, NASA has said.
“We’ll be upgrading different solar arrays, but the first ones that we started with are the most critical power channels that we have on the space station,” Sidey-Gibbons said. Those critical arrays happen to be very far out from the core of the space station, often beyond the reach of Canadarm2. This requires the astronauts, as an example of adaptation, to make their way hand-over-hand for longer periods along the boom to reach the spot at which they need to arrive.
A similar series of spacewalks last year is helping crews prepare for the round expected in the spring, Sidey-Gibbons said. She has been involved both in formulating the spacewalks in NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, and will serve as the ground lead for the astronauts on extra-vehicular activity, she said.
Like all other astronauts, Sidey-Gibbons does rotations as a capsule communicator and also helps to serve as a ground advocate for the various astronauts on the American side of the facility in space. With a new astronaut class having just arrived at the NASA Johnson Space Center, she is also providing feedback on the spacewalk training to benefit the new corps. “My recent experience with the training,” Sidey-Gibbons said of her time as an ASCAN (Astronaut Candidate), “makes the feedback that I give valuable.”
Of her research skills as a former combustion scientist, Sidey-Gibbons said the attention to detail she learned there – as well as the commitment to “improving and expanding what we know” – has benefited her and her teammates at Johnson.
“Now that I am working in this current role as a [capsule] communicator, I definitely find some of those skills that could be helpful from my previous life, and that’s either from a mentoring perspective or also a ground communicator perspective,” she said.
“One of our main jobs was taking information and processing it, and outputting it in a way that’s understandable, and very digestible,” she added. “So that’s definitely a relationship I see with my previous job, as well. That’s come in handy.”