Watch The First Spacewalk Of Expedition 50 On Board The International Space Station
The astronauts are preparing the station for a future upgrade to a second docking port.
Two astronauts take a walk today, along the outside of the International Space Station, in order to prepare the outpost for future hardware upgrades.
(L-R) Thomas Pesquet, Peggy Whitson and Shane Kimbrough - NASA
NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough and France¡¯s Thomas Pesquet are currently on a spacewalk expected to continue for a total of 6.5 hours, the first of three scheduled for the ISS crew over the next few weeks. You can watch the spacewalk live here, courtesy of NASA TV.
During the outing, Kimbrough and Pesquet have to prepare NASA¡¯s Pressurized Mating Adapter 3 (PMA-3) module so that an international docking adapter can be installed in the near future. The new docking adapter would let commercial spacecraft that fly missions to the ISS to be be able to link to the station, which can currently only be done from a single IDA port.
Going on a #spacewalk requires many weeks of planning on Earth, and many hours preparing the spacesuits and tools pic.twitter.com/iv30hKBdFL
¡ª Thomas Pesquet (@Thom_astro) March 23, 2017
The Expedition 50 crew are expected to move the PMA-3 to the correct side of the ISS, and also lubricate parts of the station¡¯s robotic arm, among other repair inspections. This is to prepare for the docking adapter¡¯s installation, which will arrive on the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship soon, NASA officials said.
The next spacewalk is scheduled for March 30, where NASA¡¯s Peggy Whitson will accompany Shane Kimbrough, with the final excursion on April 6 seeing Whitson and Pesquet leaving the airlock.
