A rare all-female spacewalk got underway Wednesday as a duo of NASA astronauts worked to complete maintenance tasks outside the International Space Station.
NASA astronauts Loral O’Hara and Jasmin Moghbeli exited the ISS airlock at 8:05 a.m., beginning their six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk outside the space station. Spacewalk 89 marked the first for both astronauts.
Wednesday’s EVA, or extravehicular activity, is only the fourth with two women in spaceflight history.
The first spacewalk with two women — NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch — happened in 2019 after more than 20 years of the ISS operating in low-Earth orbit. Meir and Koch were part of the 2013 NASA astronaut training class, the first to include the same number of women as men.
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Spacewalk 89 was initially scheduled for mid-October but was delayed after a backup radiator on the ISS’s Nauka multipurpose laboratory module began leaking coolant. Two Russian cosmonauts conducted a spacewalk last week to document and find the potential source of the leak.
During their time in the vacuum of space, O’Hara and Moghbeli will remove radio frequency group hardware and replace solar array hardware outside the ISS.
The spacewalk was available to watch on NASA TV. Mission control referred to Moghbeli as EV 1, and she was wearing a spacesuit with red stripes. As EV 2, O’Hara’s spacesuit was unmarked.
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O’Hara is scheduled to complete her second spacewalk later this year with European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen. The pair will collect microorganisms as part of an experiment during Spacewalk 90.