The Expedition 63 crew is set for its second spacewalk on Wednesday at 7:35 a.m. EDT to continue upgrading International Space Station power systems.
Commander Chris Cassidy will lead the spacewalk and exit the Quest airlock in the U.S. spacesuit with the red stripes. He’ll be followed by Flight Engineer Bob Behnken in his spacesuit with no stripes.
Both astronauts are being joined today by Flight Engineer Doug Hurley as they finalize procedure reviews, organize tools and perform suit leak checks before tomorrow’s spacewalk. Hurley will be on duty helping the spacewalkers in and out their spacesuits and monitoring the excursion. Roscosmos cosmonaut Ivan Vagner will assist the NASA trio on Wednesday.
Cassidy and Behnken have one more aging nickel-hydrogen battery to remove from the Starboard-6 truss structure and place into an external pallet. They will replace it with a new lithium-ion battery that will channel power collected from the station’s main solar arrays. After that work, the duo will move on and route power and ethernet cables before going back inside the orbiting lab to wrap up their spacewalk.
NASA TV starts its live coverage of Wednesday’s spacewalk, planned to last about six-and-a-half hours, at 6 a.m. Station managers will assess the results of the battery swaps before scheduling more power upgrade spacewalks planned for later this month.
What eventually happens to the old batteries on the pallet?
Some are inside the HTV-8 pallet stowed inside HTV-9’s unpressurized section and will be disposed upon the vehicle’s re-entry. There is not enough room for all of them to be disposed of, so three of each old set remain on the truss. Nine of the 12 old ones in the process of being removed will be put on the HTV-9 external pallet for robotic jettison later this year.
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