The equipment will support the first set of improved solar panels, due to arrive in June.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — For the second time this week, a pair of astronauts floated outside Friday to get the International Space Station ready for new solar panels.
NASA’s Kate Rubins and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi headed toward the unfinished work from Sunday’s spacewalk, located on the far port end of the orbiting lab. They needed to finish installing mounting brackets and struts, and tighten some sticky bolts.
The equipment will support the first set of improved solar panels, due to arrive in June.
NASA is upgrading the space station’s power grid to accommodate more astronauts and experiments, now that SpaceX is launching crews and Boeing should be too by year’s end. The eight solar panels up there now have degraded over time; the oldest were launched 20 years ago.
The six new…
