NASA's Spacewalks Are Back! Two Extravehicular Activities Will Take Place This Month After a Long Hiatus.
After a spacesuit leak in June of last year, NASA suspended spacewalks from the International Space Station. Now, they have resumed these activities.
Last year, the number of extravehicular activities on the International Space Station (ISS) saw a notable decline, with only three spacewalks recorded in 2024 compared to the 12 conducted in 2023. Since June 2023, NASA astronauts had not performed spacewalks due to an issue with their space suits, one of which had a water leakage problem, prompting the agency to suspend all extravehicular activities for the remainder of the year.
Recently, NASA announced the return of spacewalks. Two activities are scheduled this month: one on Thursday, January 16, and the other on Thursday, January 23. During a press conference, the agency detailed that after investigating the leakage problem, a seal and a connection were replaced, and tests were conducted on the suit that had experienced the leak to ensure its safety for use.
Matthew Dominick, a NASA astronaut, acknowledged that the space suits on the ISS have shown signs of wear, as their design dates back to the 1970s. "None of our suits are new, as we would say, so we expect to see some hardware issues after repeated use," Dominick commented.
In December last year, Russian cosmonauts conducted a spacewalk using different space suits. However, now that NASA's suits are ready for use, astronauts will be able to resume their spacewalking tasks. The first spacewalk will be carried out by Nick Hague and Suni Williams, aiming to replace a speed control gyroscope assembly that helps provide orientation control for the station, as well as to install patches on damaged areas of light filters for an X-ray telescope called NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer), and to replace a reflector device used for navigation data on one of the international docking adapters.
The second spacewalk will consist of additional maintenance work, such as removing an unnecessary radio antenna from the outside of the station and collecting samples from one of the airlocks to check for the presence of microorganisms.
