NASA astronauts Chris Cassidy and Robert Behnken are scheduled to go outside the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday, June 26, and Wednesday, July 1, for spacewalks to begin the replacement of batteries for one of the power channels on the orbiting laboratory.
Cassidy, the commander of Expedition 63, and Behnken, who joined the crew May 31 after arriving aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon with NASA astronaut Douglas Hurley on NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 test flight, will depart the Quest airlock for both spacewalks.
The spacewalking astronauts will replace aging nickel-hydrogen batteries for one of two power channels on the far starboard truss of the station with new lithium-ion batteries. The battery replacement works have started in January 2017.
The upcoming spacewalks will be the seventh and eighth ones for each astronaut.
Photo credit: Roscosmos
