NASA astronauts prepare for second spacewalk on Thursday!

Image courtesy: NASA

New Delhi: Less than two weeks ago, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Expedition 48 commander Jeff Williams and NASA Flight Engineer Kate Rubins, performed a spacewalk to install a new gateway for American commercial crew spacecraft at the space station.

Now, NASA has announced that the astronauts are preparing for their second spacewalk that will be performed on Thursday, this time to retract and cover a thermal control radiator no longer being used and install lights and a new high definition camera for better views of Earth and the station structure.

A few days after this spacewalk is completed, Jeff Williams will head back down to Earth along with his Expedition 48 crew members Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin, leaving the ropes of the ISS in the hands of NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, and astronaut Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

They will undock from the Poisk module Sept. 6 inside the Soyuz TMA-20M spacecraft and land in Kazakhstan ending their 5 ½-month mission.