NASA astronauts Woody Hoburg and Steve Bowen on Thursday upgraded the International Space Station’s power supply by installing a new roll-out solar array.
Hoburg and Bowen, flight engineers on Expedition 69, completed their spacewalk just before 2:30 p.m. EDT, after 5 hours and 35 minutes.
Their main objective, per NASA, was to install an ISS Roll-Out Array, or IROSA, to augment power generation for the 1B power channel on the station’s starboard truss structure.
Arrays are collections of solar panels wired together to capture sunlight and produce power for the space station. The ISS unfurled its first IROSA in 2017 with a robotic arm.