Two astronauts stepped outside the International Space Station Tuesday morning for the sixth all-female spacewalk in the station's history, a roughly six-and-a-half-hour excursion to swap out a spacecraft navigation aid and prep equipment for future science upgrades.
NASA's Jessica Meir and Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency switched their suits to battery power at about 7:30 a.m. EDT, formally beginning the spacewalk shortly after. It was Meir's seventh career spacewalk and Adenot's third. Inside the station, astronaut Anil Menon operated the Canadarm2 robotic arm while Jack Hathaway monitored the excursion and choreographed safety procedures from the airlock.
The pair's task list included replacing a navigational aid used to help spacecraft dock with the station, readying a cosmic particle detector mounted outside the station for a future hardware upgrade, and installing jumper cables meant to boost the station's data-relay capacity. NASA said the work was the 284th spacewalk conducted at the station since it began hosting crews in 1998.
Meir now ranks third among NASA's female astronauts for career spacewalks, trailing only Peggy Whitson, who has logged 10, and Suni Williams, who has nine. Adenot became the first Frenchwoman to conduct a spacewalk earlier this year and has quickly built a busy EVA record of her own since.
Meir was also part of the very first all-female spacewalk, alongside Christina Koch in October 2019 — an outing that had originally been planned for earlier that year with a different partner before NASA discovered it did not have enough medium-sized spacesuits on board to fit both women, forcing a postponement that drew wide public attention. Seven years and four more such spacewalks later, Tuesday's excursion drew comparatively routine coverage — a sign of how much more common the milestone has become as a larger, more experienced cohort of trained female spacewalkers cycles through the station.
NASA and ESA streamed the spacewalk live, with coverage beginning at 7 a.m. EDT on NASA's streaming platform. The station is in the midst of an unusually maintenance-heavy stretch, with Tuesday's outing the fourth spacewalk in a single month, as NASA and its partners work to keep aging external hardware running while planning for the outpost's eventual retirement later this decade.
