Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Joshua Kutryk and NASA’s Anil Menon installed the International Space Station’s eighth and final new solar array on Nov. 5, finishing an upgrade to the station’s power system that began in 2021.
Together, the eight roll-out arrays lift the station’s power-generation capacity by about 30 per cent, to about 215 kilowatts, NASA said in its spacewalk summary.
Canada’s week
“It was a good one,” Kutryk said from the Quest airlock in the final minutes of the outing, as SpaceQ’s report on the spacewalk recounted. “It was so impressive to see the team respond, and get us to where we needed to be, despite the challenges that we encountered along the way.”
Kutryk was the lead spacewalker on Nov. 5, wearing the suit with red stripes, NASA said on its broadcast as the outing began. His two spacewalks, including a seven-hour, 11-minute outing on Oct. 29, now total about 14 hours, about three and a half hours short of the Canadian record set by Dave Williams over three spacewalks in 2007.
CSA astronaut Jenni Gibbons served as the capsule communicator (CAPCOM) in mission control in Houston talking to the spacewalkers through each step. She was also CAPCOM on Oct. 29 and had worked on the ground support team for five earlier solar array spacewalks. Teams at the CSA in Longueuil, Que., again supported the operation from the ground, the agency said in a Nov. 3 media advisory.
Roxanne Côté-Bigras, a senior robotics officer at CSA headquarters, told SpaceQ on Oct. 30 that once trained alongside NASA’s flight controllers in Houston, Canadian controllers do the same job. “Canada has the same amount of capability in the control room,” she said. She and fellow controller Stephen Takacs said ground teams, not astronauts, drive Canadarm2 most of the time, with the CSA involved in that work well over 100 days a year.
The CSA introduced the Canadian robotics operators who supported both the Oct. 29 and Nov. 5 spacewalks in a video it released on Nov. 6.
Earlier in the week, Kutryk strapped on the CSA’s Bio-Monitor, a vest and headband packed with sensors, and pedalled the exercise cycle in the Destiny laboratory module. The study tracks how the heart and lungs adapt to weightlessness, according to NASA’s Nov. 2 update, and NASA’s Luke Delaney wore the same gear for the study a day later.
The original Canadarm had its own moment on Nov. 4, when the federal government unveiled a plaque at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa recognizing the arm’s first deployment in space, aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1981, as a national historic event. Retired CSA astronauts Julie Payette and Robert Thirsk and CSA astronaut David Saint-Jacques were among those at the ceremony.
Spacewalk 101
Kutryk and Menon left the Quest airlock at 8:36 a.m. EST and were back inside at 3:35 p.m., after six hours and 59 minutes. They mostly repeated the tasks of their Oct. 29 spacewalk, this time on the far end of the starboard truss, the station’s long main frame. The array went onto power channel 3B, NASA said.
NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Delaney operated Canadarm2 from inside the station, as crews do when a spacewalker rides the arm, carrying Menon and the rolled-up array toward the worksite while Kutryk made his way along the truss on tethers. The two spacewalkers then passed the array between them to reach an install site just beyond the arm’s reach. Brief power-flow problems while connecting cables slowed them after a quick start, but the teams worked through them and the pair finished with consumables to spare.
“We had a plan. We changed that plan, and the teams down there did such an incredible job pivoting, and we got it done,” Menon said as the spacewalk wrapped up. NASA’s livestream of the Nov. 5 spacewalk is below.
It was NASA’s 101st U.S. spacewalk, Kutryk’s second and Menon’s fifth, and it came three days after the station passed 26 years of continuous human occupation. Astronauts have now made 18 spacewalks since 2021 to prepare the station’s power channels and install the eight arrays, NASA said.
Science and technology experiments
On Nov. 4, Kutryk checked station water samples for microbial growth and photographed the results, Menon swabbed station surfaces for samples to incubate, and Watkins collected bacteria that will be tested for resistance to antibiotics, the space agency noted in its go-ahead for the spacewalk. Two days earlier, Watkins had checked a portable DNA sequencer used to analyze antibiotic-resistant bacteria in orbit.
Delaney kept feeding the blood-vessel tissue printed in the BioFabrication Facility, a 3D printer for living tissue, and processed human lung cells to see how well they grow in weightlessness. On Nov. 3, he joined Menon and Watkins to swap experiment payloads aboard the cargo Dragon.
In the Russian segment, station commander Pyotr Dubrov of Roscosmos set up cameras for a daylong session photographing landmarks in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Sergey Teteryatnikov, the cosmonaut who flew up with Kutryk on Crew-13, wore electrodes for a 24-hour recording of his heart activity and blood pressure, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina cleaned ventilation systems in the Zvezda service module and unloaded water from a Progress cargo ship.
Teteryatnikov also studied artificial-intelligence tools meant to make crews more efficient, then on Nov. 4 prepared the radiation detectors Kutryk and Menon were to wear on their suits during the spacewalk. Kikina checked hardware that controls science payloads.
Looking ahead
The cargo Dragon that docked Oct. 15 is expected to head home in mid-November with completed experiments and station hardware.
Crew members will use Canadarm2 to berth Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo ship, which launches no earlier than Nov. 29, and CSA robotics controllers are preparing for at least one spacewalk in January to upgrade and repair the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a cosmic-ray detector mounted outside the station. NASA has yet to name the astronauts who will do the spacewalk.