NASA conducted its last spacewalk on Thursday, December 2nd. The march ended on the International Space Station (ISS). American astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron spent a total of 6 hours and 32 minutes outside the station. The two astronauts placed an antenna outside of the ISS before picking up the defective one.
The new piece of kit on the ISS increases the confidence of communication between the space station and controllers on Earth. This was Marshburn’s fifth in three missions since 2009 and the first spacewalk for Barron. NASA made a statement on Thursday. Here, he noted, space station crew members spent a total of 64 days, 12 hours, and 26 minutes outside the station performing 245 spacewalks to support the assembly and maintenance of the orbiting lab.
NASA shared the spacewalks in cross section on Twitter
NASA has released some videos from the spacewalk below. You need to turn up the volume a little to hear the communication between the astronauts and Mission Control clearly. The first video shows two astronauts who have just exited the station and closed the hatch at the start of the spacewalk.
In the next clip, NASA gives an overview of the spacewalk. Meanwhile, the camera is attached to the end of the Canadarm robot arm, looking at the then-working astronaut Mashburn.
The video below features Marshburn and Barron. We see two astronauts removing the defective S-band antenna from the International Space Station.
We see Kayla Barron in this clip. The astronaut stands where the defective antenna was. It is stated in the Twitter post that its location is External Logistics Carrier-3.
During the spacewalk, NASA answered a viewer’s question about whether astronauts were permanently attached to the space station during the walk.
After six hours outside of the ISS, the two astronauts returned to the interior of the station. Barron commented on the first spacewalk as ‘wonderful’.
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