All-Female Crew Will Conduct The First Spacewalk Of 2020

On Wednesday morning, history got underway at the International Space Station where the second spacewalk will be conducted entirely by female astronauts.

Astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch are from NASA who according to the plan is scheduled to replace batteries on solar arrays which are outside of the International Space Station during the first spacewalk of 2020. The live feed of the same will be broadcasted by CNN. You can watch it here.

On October, the same astronauts made history by successfully completing the first-ever all-female spacewalk. This happened after the all-female crew the spacewalk in March got because of the unavailability of suitable space suits.

According to NASA ‘s statement, Koch and Meir would be going to the International space station to replace nickel-hydrogen batteries with the newer Lithium-ion batteries on the ISS’s port truss that help store power generated by the solar arrays. The schedule says that on Monday they are conducting a second spacewalk to complete the battery replacement. These spacewalks would the second and third for Meir but the fifth said sixth for Koch.

If everything goes as planned, and the battery replacement is complete, European Space Agency astronauts Andrew Morgan and space station commander Luca Parmitano will leave the station on January 25th to complete finishing the installation of the new cooling apparatus for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer(AMS). This has begun in November and December, but with this, they will verify that it’s ready for use.

The spectrometer works to identify and search for dark matter and antimatter in the universe. It does so by measuring the wavelengths of light over a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum. This can be done when the incident light from a certain light source can be absorbed or reflected or transmitted through the sample in the spectrometer.

This spacewalk on Wednesday would be the 225th conducted at the International Space Station