American and French astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Tom Pesquet on Sunday, June 20, finished installing a new solar panel on the International Space Station. The broadcast was conducted on the NASA website.
The astronauts ' second spacewalk in a week lasted about six and a half hours. Kimbrough and Pesquet finished the work they started on Wednesday, June 16. They secured the battery to the outer surface of the orbiting complex, connected it, and deployed it.
In addition, the astronauts made preparations for the subsequent installation of a second solar battery. It is expected that these works will continue on June 25.
Earlier on Sunday, it was reported that Kimbrough on the ISS had to replace his spacesuit after problems with the spacewalk occurred on June 16.
Earlier, on June 2, Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov on the ISS made the first spacewalk this year. They had, in particular, to replace the replaceable panel of the liquid flow regulator on the Zarya module.
As Novitsky noted earlier, what made this spacewalk special was the combination of resource work, space experiments, and the preparation of the ISS for the reception of a new module — the multi-purpose laboratory module "Nauka".
