Guide to Following the Last Spacewalk of the ISS in 2024.
The space station will conduct its third and final spacewalk of 2024 on Thursday, December 19. Here’s how you can watch it.
The International Space Station (ISS) will carry out its third and final spacewalk of 2024 on Thursday, December 19. Cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, who are part of Expedition 72, will be responsible for installing an experimental package aimed at monitoring celestial X-ray sources, as well as new electrical connector panels. They will also proceed to remove several experiments for disposal. Both Russian cosmonauts will relocate a control panel for the European robotic arm, which is attached to the multipurpose laboratory module Nauka. A third cosmonaut from Roscosmos, Alexsandr Gorbunov, will operate the robotic arm from inside the station during the spacewalk.
This will be Ovchinin's second spacewalk and Vagner's first. For identification, Ovchinin's spacesuit will feature red stripes, while Vagner's will have blue stripes. This activity will be marked as spacewalk number 272, supporting the construction, maintenance, and improvement of the space station.
The current year has seen a quiet pace in terms of spacewalks on the ISS. From 2021 to 2023, at least 12 spacewalks were conducted annually, but in June of this year, NASA suspended its spacewalk program following a water leak incident in an astronaut's suit during a scheduled outing. During this suspension, engineers conducted investigations and developed a solution that involved replacing a seal and the umbilical connecting the suit to the station. A successful repressurization of the affected suit was achieved, although additional tests were conducted to ensure that the suit design was reliable and safe.
Despite the Russian cosmonauts using different suits, the space agency Roscosmos also halted its spacewalk program as a precautionary measure, allowing officials and cosmonauts to thoroughly review all their equipment.
NASA will provide live coverage of the spacewalk of the two Roscosmos cosmonauts, scheduled for December 19, starting at 9:45 a.m. ET, with the spacewalk expected to begin around 10:10 a.m. ET and last approximately six and a half hours.
