About three hours into today’s spacewalk, NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough made his way back to the Quest airlock at the International Space Station to reconnect his spacesuit to an umbilical connection and restarted it. The reset corrected the issues with his spacesuit’s display and controls module that provides him information about the status of his spacesuit.
In addition, after seeing a spike in the reading for pressure in his sublimator, which provides cooling for his spacesuit, flight controllers had Kimbrough cycle the sublimator. The data stabilized.
Kimbrough is safe and has now made his way back to the worksite where the new solar arrays remain in the flight support equipment.
Meanwhile, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet remained in the foot restraint attached to the end of the station’s robotic Canadarm2 in preparation to continue the work to release the new ISS Roll-Out Solar Array (iROSA) from the flight support equipment.
The spacewalking duo is preparing to install the iROSA in front of the current solar arrays on the station’s left (port) side, known as P6, to upgrade the 2B power channel and will resume working through the next steps on today’s timeline.
Watch the spacewalk on NASA TV, the NASA app, and on the agency’s website.
Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on Twitter as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.