NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, of Caribou, stepped out into space Tuesday for the seventh time.
Meir and European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot conducted a spacewalk to replace a navigational aid and conduct other maintenance on the International Space Station.
Tuesday’s spacewalk moves Meir into third place for total spacewalks by women at NASA, the agency said. Peggy Whitson leads with 10, followed by Suni Williams with nine.
Meir and Adenot were first set to replace a retroreflector — used during rendezvous and docking operations — before working to install jumper cables for data-relay systems, preparing a radiator for future maintenance and replacing a camera, NASA said in its announcement of the spacewalk.
The spacewalk began at 8:40 a.m. and lasted 6 hours, 49 minutes. Livestreamed coverage is available on NASA’s website, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Discovery+ and NASA+.
Meir has now spent more than two full days tethered to the space station, bringing her career spacewalk time to 49 hours, 22 minutes, NASA said. It was the seventh spacewalk this year and 284th overall in support of space station assembly and maintenance.
Toward the end of the mission, Adenot experienced an issue with her suit. Meir inspected it, ultimately determining that a glove heater harness was caught and was obstructing movement in her left shoulder, NASA said. Meir could be seen in the livestream adjusting Adenot’s suit for several minutes before the two entered the space station’s airlock.
Mission Control deferred one of the assigned tasks to a future spacewalk to give engineers more time to plan, NASA said in a blog post Tuesday, while some noncritical tasks were also deferred due to time constraints.
Meir, the commander of the ongoing SpaceX Crew-12 mission, launched back to the International Space Station in February — her second journey to the station. Her previous mission, in 2019, lasted 205 days and featured the first all-female spacewalk.
Meir, the first Maine woman to travel to space, has been an astronaut since 2013.
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