NASA astronauts prep ISS for new solar arrays on 5th-ever all-female spacewalk

Two NASA astronauts performed history's fifth all-female spacewalk today (May 1), moving an antenna and partially preparing the International Space Station for a new set of solar arrays.

Expedition 73 crewmates Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers competed a 5-hour, 44-minute extravehicular activity (EVA, or spacewalk) at 2:49 p.m. EDT (1849 GMT) today, after they reentered the station's Quest airlock and it began to be re-pressurized.

McClain and Ayers accomplished most of what they set out achieve today, but running late on their timeline and with limited consumables, they had to defer some of the tasks to a later spacewalk.

Getting started at 9:05 a.m. EDT (1305 GMT), the two women carried tools and equipment out to the port (or left) side of the space station's backbone truss, where they got to work assembling the attachment hardware for the seventh pair of International Space Station Rollout Solar Arrays, or IROSA, which will be installed after they arrive on a SpaceX Dragon commercial resupply services mission later this year.

When complete, the new smaller, but more efficient, solar arrays will boost electricity generation capability by up to 30%, increasing the station's total available power from 160 to up to 215 kilowatts.

McClain and Ayers built and mounted the upper triangle of the mast canister modification kit, as well as the right struts, but then were instructed to clean up their workstations and move on to the next, higher priority task.

"We have reached the min config and have decided to clean up and prioritize the C2V2 [Common Communications for Visiting Vehicles]," mission control at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston advised the two spacewalkers.

The astronauts stowed their equipment and McClain repositioned a foot restraint. She and Ayers then met at the P3 truss segment, also on the left side of the International Space Station. There they relocated an antenna used by Northrop Grumman's Cygnus cargo vehicles when they come to resupply the space station.

With the limited time remaining in the EVA, the astronauts wrapped up their work by tackling a couple of "get ahead" tasks. While Ayers ran and attached a jumper cable to convert DC power from the U.S. operating segment's P6 truss to the Russian segment of the space station, McClain worked on releasing bolts on a micro-meteoroid debris cover to prep it for future work.

"With this year being the 25th anniversary of a continuous human presence in space, it seems fitting that we are continuing to upgrade the ISS to keep it alive through 2030," Ayers radioed to mission control after she was back inside the airlock. "We're honored to be a small part of a much larger team that facilitates the ground-breaking science that we perform on the national lab that is the International Space Station."

"What we accomplish here not only furthers our efforts to return to the moon and go on to Mars, but informs how we do life on Earth," said Ayers.

This spacewalk was McClain's third and the first for Ayers. McClain has now logged a total of 18 hours and 52 minutes outside the space station.

This was the 93rd EVA to be staged from the U.S. Quest airlock and the 275th overall in support of the assembly, maintenance and upgrade of the ISS, which has been continuously occupied by rotating astronaut crews since November 2000.

The first all-female EVA was performed by NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir in October 2019. That duo conducted two more spacewalks together in January 2020, and NASA's Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O'Hara did a walk of their own in November 2023.