Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Joshua Kutryk made his first spacewalk on Oct. 29 and, with NASA’s Anil Menon, installed and deployed the International Space Station’s seventh new solar array, leaving one more to install on Nov. 5.
The outing, which lasted seven hours and 11 minutes, made Kutryk the fifth Canadian to walk in space and the first since David Saint-Jacques in 2019, as our report on the spacewalk detailed.
Canada’s week
As the spacewalk wound down, Kutryk thanked his crewmates and the ground teams and tied the work to exploration farther out. “Today was a step forward [for] the future of space station,” he said, calling it “another step of many forward, towards the EVA that teams will hopefully be doing on the surface of the Moon soon.”
CSA astronaut Jenni Gibbons served as CAPCOM, short for capsule communicator, relaying instructions from mission control in Houston. Before the outing, ground controllers, including those at CSA headquarters in Longueuil, Que., had used the Canadarm2 robotic arm to pull the new array out of the trunk of the cargo Dragon that delivered it and to loosen some of its bolts, agency officials told SpaceQ.
Saint-Jacques watched from the Montreal Science Centre, where he told SpaceQ he had helped work out some of the solar array procedures years ago in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, NASA’s training pool in Houston.
NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney packed up the Canadarm2 wrist joint that malfunctioned in May and was replaced during a June 30 spacewalk, so it can return to Earth aboard the cargo Dragon in November, according to NASA’s Oct. 27 update. The joint will be inspected and could be refurbished for reuse.
On Oct. 30, the day after his spacewalk, Kutryk pedalled the European Enhanced Exploration Exercise Device (E4D) in the Columbus module, a machine being tested to keep crews fit on long spaceflights, NASA said in its end-of-week update.
Spacewalk 100
Kutryk and Menon switched their spacesuits to battery power at 7:57 a.m. EDT and were back inside at 3:08 p.m. Menon left the Quest airlock first, and Kutryk followed six minutes later.
The pair first unbolted the rolled-up array from the platform where it had been stowed. Menon then rode the end of Canadarm2, carrying the 340-kilogram array in his hands, to the port side of the station’s truss, its long main frame, while Kutryk worked his way along the truss on tethers to meet him. Watkins and Delaney flew the arm from inside, under the plan NASA laid out in its Oct. 28 go-ahead. The spacewalkers then fastened the array to one of the station’s power channels and released the bolts holding it rolled up, and it unfurled on its own in about 10 minutes. The array is already generating power, NASA said.
Kutryk and Menon ran ahead of schedule for most of the spacewalk, which gave them time to loosen bolts and finish other jobs ahead of the next one. It was Menon’s fourth spacewalk.
Once the eighth array is in place, the new set will lift the station’s power-generation capacity from 160 kilowatts to about 215 kilowatts, NASA said. The agency says the extra power will support critical station operations, including a safe, controlled descent from orbit at the end of the station’s life.
Science and technology experiments
Delaney logged his sleep on a tablet for RelaxPro, a study of ways to reduce stress on long missions, and kept feeding the bioprinted blood-vessel tissue the crew began growing the week before, NASA said in its Oct. 26 update. In the station’s Russian segment, station commander Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina wore cuffs on their arms, wrists and fingers to measure how the circulatory system responds to weightlessness.
Watkins readied a high-speed camera in the European Columbus module for research on thunderstorms, and Delaney set up a camera and computer in a glovebox in Japan’s Kibo module for an investigation into plant disease and life support. Sergey Teteryatnikov, the Roscosmos cosmonaut who flew up with Kutryk on Crew-13, used the European robotic arm to inspect a docking port on Russia’s Rassvet module.
Dubrov and Kikina installed cameras that photographed islands in the southern Pacific and Atlantic oceans and South America’s Patagonia region in several wavelengths while the crew slept. On Oct. 28, Teteryatnikov set up a second set to image Pacific islands and South American glaciers overnight, and Kikina ran on the treadmill in the Zvezda service module to test her fitness, the space agency noted in its spacewalk go-ahead.
Delaney took his plant-disease study a step further on Oct. 30, infecting thale cress samples with a fungal pathogen and stowing them in an incubator that generates artificial gravity. NASA says the results may help make crops more resistant to disease on Earth and in space. Menon worked on a botany study in Kibo of how weightlessness affects cell division in green algae and cultured tobacco cells, research that may support growing food on the Moon and Mars.
Dubrov swapped hardware in a temperature-controlled chamber for an experiment on making high-purity semiconductor crystals in weightlessness. Teteryatnikov wore a virtual-reality headset and responded to visual cues to test how his sense of balance and orientation adapts, and Kikina studied how artificial-intelligence tools might make operations and communications aboard a spacecraft more efficient.
Looking ahead
Kutryk and Menon are scheduled to make their second spacewalk together on Nov. 5 to install the eighth and final array, on the station’s 3B power channel, which will finish the power upgrade. NASA+ coverage of U.S. spacewalk 101 starts at 6:45 a.m. EST, SpaceQ’s will broadcast the live feed from NASA.
The cargo Dragon that docked Oct. 15 is due to leave the station in mid-November.