Sunita Williams perform spacewalk first in 12 years

NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, of Indian descent, performed a spacewalk on Thursday alongside her colleague Nick Hague outside the International Space Station (ISS), as reported by the US space agency. This marks Ms. Williams’ first spacewalk in 12 years, and her eighth overall, while it’s Hague’s fourth. The mission named US Spacewalk 91 is anticipated to continue for approximately six and a half hours.

Mr. Hague is a spacewalk crew member 1 and is dressed in a suit featuring red stripes. Ms. Williams is acting as crew member 2 for the spacewalk and is dressed in a plain suit. NASA stated that the astronaut pair is presently engaged in maintenance duties and hardware replacement.

NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Suni Williams exit the Space Station to assist with upgrades, which include maintenance on our NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer) X-ray telescope. In a blog article, NASA announced that Ms. Williams and Hague will be tasked with replacing a rate gyro assembly that aids in providing orientation control for the station and applying patches to repair damaged sections of light filters for NICER. They will additionally swap out a reflector device utilized for navigation data on one of the international docking adapters.

Furthermore, the duo will examine access points and connector instruments that will be utilized for upcoming maintenance tasks on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. NASA announced a second spacewalk planned to start at 8:15 a.m. on January 23.

In the course of the second mission, Mr. Wilmore and Ms. Williams will detach a radio frequency group antenna assembly from the station’s truss and gather surface material samples from the Destiny laboratory and the Quest airlock to investigate the potential presence of microorganisms on the outer surface of the orbital complex.

They will also create an extra elbow joint for the Canadarm2 robotic arm in case it is required for substitution. In the meantime, NASA has postponed the return mission for Ms. Williams and Willmore to Earth, as the launch of SpaceX Crew 10 has now been pushed to late March 2025.

Ms. Williams and Mr. Willmore were the first individuals to experience a ride on the Starliner, created by Boeing. What started as an eight-day trip on the International Space Station (ISS) has turned into 10 months in space for the astronauts, while the defective Starliner, deemed unsuitable for human travel by NASA, has returned to Earth safely.

The astronauts were set to come back to Earth aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule in February 2025. Nevertheless, NASA chose to postpone Crew 10 to provide more preparation time for the new SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, ensuring better safety for the astronauts. Recently, Ms. Williams remarked that she “wants to return home since we departed from our families some time ago, but we have plenty to accomplish while we’re here.”