NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk installed and deployed the eighth and final International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array on the 3B power channel on Nov. 5, completing the station's power-augmentation upgrades after a 6-hour, 59-minute spacewalk that ended at 3:35 p.m. EST.
The excursion began at 8:36 a.m. EST. It was U.S. spacewalk 101, Menon's fifth and Kutryk's second, and the 286th spacewalk supporting station assembly, maintenance and upgrades, NASA said. A week earlier, the same pair installed the seventh array on Oct. 29.
NASA astronauts Luke Delaney and Jessica Watkins manoeuvred Canadarm2 to help the pair, the Canadian Space Agency said, as Menon and Kutryk moved the roughly 340-kilogram folded array to its starboard worksite, Space.com reported. After Menon attached the cables to tie the iROSA into the station's systems, the crew ran into a problem. The connectors needed to be inspected, and out of safety concerns the astronauts waited for the station to enter the shadow of Earth; deployment was later cleared. The array then unfurled under stored strain energy in its carbon composite booms to a full length of about 19 meters.