Overview
- NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk completed the final spacewalk Thursday, Nov. 5, spending 6 hours and 59 minutes outside to mount and unfurl the eighth IROSA unit.
- Flight controllers detected a lower‑than‑expected shunt current during the EVA and the crew waited for orbital night to inspect and reseat a power connector, after which controllers reported normal currents and cleared the array for deployment.
- Each iROSA is a compact roll‑out photovoltaic wing that uses stored strain energy to unfurl without motors and produces about 8 kilowatts in sunlight, and the eight new units together raise available station power from roughly 160 kW to about 215 kW.
- The final pairs of IROSAs were manufactured by Redwire, delivered folded in SpaceX Dragon’s unpressurized trunk, and installed using coordinated EVA work, crew handoffs and Canadarm2 robotic moves because the far‑outboard site was beyond direct arm reach.
- The five‑year IROSA campaign began in 2021 to offset degradation of the original 2000–2009 wings and this completion gives NASA more power margin to run experiments, visiting vehicles and life‑support systems through the ISS’s planned controlled deorbit around 2030.