On Oct. 29 and Nov. 5, astronauts Anil Menon and Joshua Kutryk will step outside the International Space Station to install the last two roll-out solar arrays. NASA laid out the plan at a news conference in Houston on Oct. 20, 2026. With both in place, station power capacity should climb from 160 to about 215 kilowatts, NASA says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The speakers at Johnson Space Center were Gaurang Patel, operations integration manager for NASA’s Low Earth Orbit Program, and Garrett Hehn, a spacewalk flight director. NASA posted the 28-minute session on YouTube.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
U.S. spacewalk 100 is set for Thursday, Oct. 29. Menon, of NASA, and Kutryk, of the Canadian Space Agency, will leave the Quest airlock at about 8 a.m. EDT. NASA+ coverage starts at 6:30 a.m., according to the space station blog<\/a>. It will be Menon’s fourth spacewalk and Kutryk’s first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pair go back out on Thursday, Nov. 5, for U.S. spacewalk 101. That one should begin at 8:10 a.m. EST, with coverage from 6:45 a.m. It will be Menon’s fifth outing and Kutryk’s second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n NASA numbers this series from the first spacewalk made out of Quest with no space shuttle docked. Patel said Carl Walz and Dan Bursch made it during Expedition 4, on Feb. 20, 2002. Counting all station work, the outings will be the 285th and 286th. Oct. 29 also brings the eighth spacewalk of 2026, Patel said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n NASA calls the panels IROSAs, short for International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Arrays. The last pair arrived on Oct. 15 aboard SpaceX’s 35th cargo mission. That Dragon also brought more than 6,300 pounds (about 2,860 kilograms) of supplies. The seventh array goes on the 2A power channel, on the port side of the truss. The eighth and final one goes on the 3B channel, on the starboard side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The NASA media advisory<\/a> says the seventh array will add power for critical station operations, including the station’s safe and controlled deorbit. That final descent will depend on the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle that SpaceX is building for NASA<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The eight roll-out arrays “increase our power generation capability up to 30 percent,” Patel told reporters, as NASA’s blog<\/a> reported. Hehn said about 20 percent of the previous 99 U.S. spacewalks went into this upgrade. On Aug. 6, Menon helped build a modification kit on the Starboard 6 truss segment. NASA plans to mount one of the new arrays there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The robotic arm has already parked the rolled, folded arrays on a cart outside the station, one on top of the other. Hehn said each one weighs about 750 pounds (340 kilograms) folded and measures about 10 feet (3 meters) long. First, the crew will remove bolts and launch locks to free the top array.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Menon will then ride the Canadarm2 robotic arm out to the 2A spot with the array in his hands. Kutryk will meet him there. Together they will slot it onto a mod kit from an earlier spacewalk, bolt it down and let it unfold. The package grows from about 10 feet to about 20 feet (6 meters) long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next the blanket rolls out. “I kind of think of them like a snap bracelet. If you remember that time, they basically have a series of magnets up the side where they deploy with enough energy that it just continues rolling out steadily,” Hehn said. The deployment takes about 10 minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The cable work has to happen in orbital night. The crew will add a jumper that joins the power of the older arrays with the new one. Hehn said nobody can handle those cables while sunlight hits the panels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Between the outings, the team will move the mobile transporter to the other side of the station. This rail car carries the robotics gear. The Nov. 5 job mirrors the first one, but the arm cannot reach the outboard spot. So Kutryk will climb onto a second platform and hold the array. Menon will then swing his own platform about 180 degrees, a move Hehn’s team calls the leapfrog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hehn said the arm will rotate around the array’s center of mass and move one axis at a time, a lesson from earlier spacewalks. The array weighs nothing in orbit, he explained, “but you do have to combat all that inertia and its unwillingness to rotate when you are rotating.” Crewmates inside will fly the arm. NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney will help the spacewalkers suit up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Asked why one pair will do both spacewalks, Hehn said the two jobs are mirror images with shared hardware. That lets Menon and Kutryk reuse hours of study. Other crew members have trained for the work and could step in if something went wrong, he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both astronauts rehearsed the task in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, the big training pool at Johnson. Hehn said the pool reproduces the spacewalk in chunks, from start to finish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Specialists in Houston also watch forecasts for coronal mass ejections, Hehn said. These solar blasts take a few days to reach low Earth orbit. The specialists’ reports feed the go\/no-go poll on spacewalk day, and NOAA tracks how fast the strongest solar storms can reach Earth<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat the new arrays add<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How the first array goes up<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A leapfrog on the starboard side<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Why the same two astronauts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n