Excerpt:

>NASA will provide live coverage of the first spacewalk beginning at 6 a.m. EST on Saturday, Dec. 3 on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website. The spacewalk is scheduled to begin at 7:25 a.m. and last about seven hours.

>NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio will exit the station’s Quest airlock to install an International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array (iROSA) to augment power generation for the 3A power channel on the station’s starboard truss structure.

>This spacewalking task will restore redundancy for affected station systems following unexpected tripping observed on the 1B channel Nov. 26. By isolating a section of the impacted array, which was one of several damaged strings, the goal is to restore 75% of the array’s functionality.

>Cassada and Rubio are scheduled to conduct the next U.S. spacewalk Dec.19, this time to install an iROSA on the 4A power channel on the port truss.

Credits: NASA; editing by Roxana Bardan.