A Spacesuit Snag Left Astronauts With Unfinished Business on a 7-Hour Spacewalk

NASA astronaut Jessica Meir and ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot ended a spacewalk outside the International Space Station at 3:29 p.m. EDT on Sept. 1 after installing a new navigation reflector on the station's Harmony module and leaving part of their task list for a future spacewalk.

NASA says the pair worked for 6 hours and 49 minutes. They installed a retroreflector, a passive reflective target used for navigation, on the forward port of Harmony to support spacecraft navigation during rendezvous and docking. The astronauts also replaced a high-definition camera on the station's truss and completed a swab of the station's exterior for microorganisms.

Two tasks were left unfinished. Mission Control deferred installing the remaining guide studs for a replacement heat-rejecting radiator for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, the particle detector mounted outside the station, so engineers can develop a plan to finish the work on a future spacewalk. The pair only partially completed work to install jumper cables for electrical systems. After the crew fell behind the timeline, Mission Control shifted the remaining cables and other noncritical tasks to a later date.

Adenot had mobility problems with her left arm during the excursion. Meir examined the suit and determined that the glove heater harness was likely catching and limiting movement in the left shoulder joint. Unzipping the joint appeared to resolve the issue before the two entered the airlock.

NASA logs the outing as U.S. spacewalk 99 and as the 284th spacewalk in support of station assembly, maintenance and upgrades. It was Meir's seventh spacewalk and Adenot's third. The agency says Meir now ranks third all-time among women at NASA, behind Peggy Whitson with 10 and Suni Williams with 9.

Space.com and collectSPACE reported the spacewalk as the sixth all-female spacewalk in history.