Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Joshua Kutryk will perform two spacewalks from the International Space Station (ISS) twice in the coming weeks, NASA announced Wednesday, to install the last two of the new solar arrays the station has been adding since 2021.
Kutryk and NASA astronaut Anil Menon are scheduled to leave the station’s Quest airlock on Oct. 29 and again on Nov. 5. Each outing will fit and unroll one International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array (IROSA), a thin, flexible panel mounted in front of one of the station’s original wings and partly covering it. The Oct. 29 array will be the seventh; the Nov. 5 array, the eighth and last.
NASA said the full set will lift the station’s generating capacity from 160 kilowatts to about 215. The agency said the upgraded array’s power will support critical station operations, including the controlled descent that will bring the station out of orbit at the end of its life, currently scheduled for 2030.
Canadarm2, the Canadian-built robotic arm, will serve as a platform for one of the two spacewalkers to stand on, the CSA said. Chris Hadfield helped attach that arm to the station on Canada’s first spacewalk, in April 2001.
Kutryk will be the fifth CSA astronaut to work outside the station, after Hadfield, Steve MacLean, Dave Williams and David Saint-Jacques, and the first since Saint-Jacques’s spacewalk in April 2019. He reached the station with SpaceX Crew-13 on Oct. 1, on his first spaceflight, and is due to stay about six months.
Menon spacewalked on Aug. 6 to ready the station’s starboard truss, part of the long girder that carries its solar wings, for one of the new arrays. NASA has designated the Oct. 29 outing U.S. spacewalk 100, the agency’s running count of U.S. station excursions.
NASA will preview both spacewalks at a news conference from Johnson Space Center in Houston at 2 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Oct. 20, with Gaurang Patel, operations integration manager for the agency’s Low Earth Orbit Program, and spacewalk flight director Garrett Hehn. Coverage times for each spacewalk will be posted closer to the day, NASA said.