Historic Spacewalk Begins
NASA astronaut Anil Menon and France’s Sophie Adenot stepped outside the International Space Station on Tuesday for a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk, with a faulty communications antenna in their sights.
Footage shows Menon opening the hatch before the pair emerge from the orbiting laboratory, around 260 miles above Earth. Adenot can be seen working on the space-to-ground antenna, before later shots show the astronauts side by side with the Earth stretching out beneath them.
The mission marked a giant first for Adenot, who became the first French woman to conduct a spacewalk.
It was Menon’s second trip outside the station, following a previous spacewalk with NASA astronaut Jessica Meir on August 6.
Replacing Faulty Antenna
At the start of Tuesday’s operation, the ISS was travelling northwest to southeast across northern Africa, orbiting Earth at an inclination of 51.6 degrees to the equator.
Menon served as spacewalk crew member one, wearing a suit marked with red stripes, while European Space Agency astronaut Adenot served as crew member two in an unmarked suit.
Their main job was to rip out and replace a degraded Space-to-Ground Antenna, a crucial high-speed communications link between the ISS and Mission Control in Houston.
NASA said the ageing antenna began suffering problems with its ability to swivel, or gimbal, in November. The unit had been installed during the STS-132 Space Shuttle mission in May 2010 by NASA astronauts Garrett Reisman and Steve Bowen.
17-Year Spare Finally Used
And its replacement had been waiting in orbit for 17 years.
The spare antenna was delivered during the STS-127 mission and installed outside the station by astronauts Dave Wolf and Tom Marshburn on July 20, 2009, the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.
The station’s first space-to-ground antenna on the Z1 truss was carried into orbit aboard STS-92 in October 2000 and installed by astronauts Leroy Chiao and William MacArthur.
Tuesday’s excursion was the 282nd spacewalk devoted to assembling, maintaining and upgrading the ISS, with the operation expected to last around six and a half hours.
NASA TV, via Viory.Video
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