Two astronauts will venture outside the International Space Station today for a planned six-and-a-half hour spacewalk, NASA has said.
Mark Vande Hei of NASA and Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency are scheduled to begin the spacewalk at 7:10 am EST to move components for the station’s robotic system into long-term storage, the US space agency said on Wednesday.
The spacewalk will be the 208th in support of space station assembly and maintenance and the third in 2018.
The two spacewalkers will move a Latching End Effector (LEE), or hand, for the Canadian-built robotic arm, Canadarm2, from a payload attachment on the station’s Mobile Base System rail car to the Quest airlock.
This LEE was replaced during an Expedition 53 spacewalk in October 2017, and will be returned to Earth to be refurbished and relaunched to the orbiting laboratory as a spare.They will also move an aging, but functional, LEE that was detached from the arm during a January 23 spacewalk and move it from its temporary storage outside the airlock to a long-term storage location.
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The spacewalk was originally scheduled for January 29th, but was postponed when a new LEE, installed during the spacewalk, encountered startup issues.
Those issues were later resolved through software updates written by Canadian Space Agency robotics specialists.