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Spacewalk will take ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer on ‘complete tour of the space station’
In the course of the six-and-a-half-hour tour, the astronauts will work on quite a lot of duties. Chari and Maurer will set up hoses on a radiator beam valve module, which routes ammonia by the station’s heat-rejecting radiators. These make sure that house station techniques stay on the correct temperature.
Moreover, Chari and Maurer will change an exterior digital camera, set up an influence and knowledge cable on the Columbus module’s Bartolomeo science platform, and conduct another upgrades.
Contained in the station, NASA astronauts Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn will function the Canadarm2 robotics arm to help the spacewalkers.
It is the 248th spacewalk in assist of assembling, sustaining and upgrading the house station. This can be Chari’s second spacewalk after conducting his first alongside Barron final Tuesday, and the primary for Maurer. Maurer will turn into the twelfth ESA astronaut to conduct a spacewalk.
In the course of the spacewalk, Chari can be extravehicular crew member 1 sporting the swimsuit with purple stripes, and Maurer can be identifiable as extravehicular crew member 2 within the swimsuit with no stripes.
Maurer’s first house outing can be a busy one as he traverses a lot of the house station’s exterior, in response to the ESA.
“I’ll exit with my expensive colleague Raja. He’ll do some repairs for the cooling system of the Station, and I’ll stroll round or, I ought to say, crawl round one other a part of the Station and do completely different small actions,” Maurer stated in a press release. “I actually do must do an entire tour of the Area Station. It’s a motley combine and I am completely wanting ahead to it.”
When Maurer installs the ability and knowledge cable for Bartolomeo, the primary European business facility positioned outdoors of the house station, it will likely be the ultimate step in connecting the module in order that it is totally operational.
Cooperation with Russian house company
The crew rely will drop again all the way down to seven on March 30 when NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returns to Earth with Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov. They may undock from the house station within the Soyuz MS-19 crew ship and land in Kazakhstan about three and a half hours later.
Final week, NASA reaffirmed that it is nonetheless working intently with Russian house company Rocosmos on the house station, regardless of mounting geopolitical tensions.
When Vande Hei lands, he may have spent 355 consecutive days in house, breaking the earlier spaceflight report set by retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly.
CNN’s Jackie Wattles contributed to this report.