Indian-origin Sunita Williams did a spacewalk after 12 years, came out for the first time in seven months
Indian-origin Sunita Williams stepped out of the International Space Station for a spacewalk with colleague Nick Hague on Thursday. This is Williams' first spacewalk in 12 years and the eighth spacewalk of his career. NASA said that both will do maintenance work and replace hardware. The launch of SpaceX Crew 10 will be delayed due to the postponement till the end of March.
Indian-origin Sunita Williams stepped out of the International Space Station for a spacewalk with colleague Nick Hague on Thursday. This is Williams' first spacewalk in 12 years and the eighth spacewalk of his career.
NASA said that both will do maintenance work and replace hardware. Meanwhile, Williams and Wilmore's return mission to Earth will be delayed again, as the launch of SpaceX Crew 10 has been delayed till the end of March 2025. Both were to return to Earth in February on a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
In a post, NASA said that Sunita Williams and Nick Hague are stepping outside the space station to update the station, including repairing the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) X-ray telescope.
Williams and Hague will work to replace a rate gyro assembly that helps provide orientation control for the station. They will also replace a reflector device used for navigational data on one of the international docking adapters.
The pair will check connector tools that will be used for future maintenance work on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. NASA said another spacewalk will begin on January 23 at 8:15 am.
Sunita Williams along with her fellow astronaut Butch Wilmore had reached the ISS on June 5 traveling in Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. They were to return in nine days, but NASA later declared the Starliner unfit for human travel, after which the Starliner returned to Earth unoccupied. Now they are expected to return to Earth by the end of March or April.
Several companies are in competition in space with Elon Musk's SpaceX. A giant rocket was launched Thursday by Blue Origin - owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in its first test flight. The 320-foot-high New Glenn rocket was launched from Florida.
With this, a prototype satellite was launched to orbit several thousand miles above Earth, lifting off from the same launch pad where NASA's Mariner and Pioneer spacecraft were launched half a century ago.
