Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and NASA astronaut Anil Menon are scheduled to begin a spacewalk at 8:30 a.m. EST on Thursday, Nov. 5, to install the eighth and final roll-out solar array on the outpost's starboard, or right-hand, truss structure. NASA expects the excursion to last about seven hours.
The outing is the second of two spacewalks planned to upgrade the station's power generation system. On Oct. 29, the same pair installed a roll-out array on the port truss, the structure on the opposite side from Thursday's worksite.
Preparations have filled the crew's week. On Nov. 2, Kutryk and Menon joined NASA flight engineers Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney to study procedures for the Canadarm2 robotic arm, and the four held a pair of pre-spacewalk conferences with mission controllers: first with spacewalk specialists, then with robotics engineers. A day later, Kutryk and Menon staged their tools inside the Quest airlock, inspected the tethers that will secure them to the outpost and reviewed the planned activities, NASA's station blog reported.