This year’s first spacewalk will be performed by the two NASA astronauts who are currently aboard the International Space Station and will step out into space to swap and stow external robotics gears. Expedition 54 Flight Engineer Mark Vande Hei will lead the operation, joined by Flight Engineer Scott Tingle.
The objective of this spacewalk, as briefed by NASA, will be “…to replace one of the two redundant Latching End Effectors (LEE) on Canadarm2, the station’s robotic arm, which has experienced some degradation of its snaring cables. A spare LEE will replace the current LEE B.”
Spacewalks are conducted to support the ISS assembly and maintenance, which the researchers and engineers look forward to after the launch of every mission.
The next spacewalk is scheduled for January 29th, where the work will be continued. “The next spacewalk will be devoted to securing the degraded LEE B on the station’s Mobile Base System rail car as a spare. Similar work was conducted on the robotic arm’s LEE A during a series of spacewalks last October.” announced NASA. In the second spacewalk, Mark Vande Hei will be accompanied by Flight Engineer Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
These excursions, after US spacewalk 47 and 48, will be the third and fourth expeditions in the career of Mark Vande Hei, and first for both Scott Tingle and Norishige Kanai.