NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Anil Menon sealed the Quest airlock at 3:00 p.m. ET on Thursday, August 6, after 6 hours and 27 minutes outside the International Space Station — long enough to install the mounting hardware that will receive the seventh, and final, roll-out solar array the station will ever receive. The walk, U.S. Spacewalk 96 and the 281st in the station’s assembly, maintenance, and upgrade history, puts the 3B power channel one hardware delivery away from accepting the new wing. That delivery, expected later in 2026, will complete the power configuration NASA needs not just to sustain the station, but to bring it down safely in 2030.
Thursday’s walk was Menon’s first. He arrived at the station 23 days earlier, aboard Soyuz MS-29, and stepped into open space for the first time in his life carrying one end of an eight-foot-long bag containing six struts and the components of a mounting bracket with a mass of more than 300 pounds (136 kilograms) on Earth — not easy to maneuver in microgravity given the inertia its mass produces. He and Meir assembled the bracket from start to finish using pistol-grip tools, routed the cabling that will carry electricity from the future array into the 3B channel, and wrapped the newly installed struts in multi-layer insulation to protect them from micrometeoroid impact. The mission met all its primary objectives.
This is not the station’s last scheduled spacewalk — two more are planned this month — but it is the last time astronauts will go outside specifically to add power capacity to the ISS. The station enters its final operational years having received every external power upgrade it will ever get.
Read more: Meir and Menon Head Out August 6 to Power Station Through Its Final Years
The iROSA wing that will eventually occupy the 3B channel is not the kind of solar array the station launched with in the early 2000s. Those original Solar Array Wings used rigid panels folded on mechanical hinges — heavy, volume-intensive, and mechanically complex. The iROSA design eliminates all of that.
Each iROSA wing uses 30.7%-efficient XTJ Prime triple-junction photovoltaic cells made by Boeing’s Spectrolab subsidiary. Triple-junction means the cell stacks three photovoltaic semiconductor layers, each tuned to absorb a different band of the solar spectrum. A single-junction silicon cell — the kind used in most terrestrial solar installations — captures roughly 20–22% of incoming solar energy. A triple-junction cell captures photons that the silicon cell misses entirely: the top junction (gallium indium phosphide) handles high-energy blue and ultraviolet photons; the middle junction (gallium arsenide) captures the peak of the visible spectrum; and the germanium bottom junction catches the infrared photons that make it through the first two layers. The three layers together squeeze roughly 30.7% of incoming solar radiation into electrical current.
The cells are bonded to a flexible substrate and rolled around composite boom spars that behave like a carpenter’s tape measure — stored flat under mechanical tension, they spring outward and extend the array when released. Deployment requires no motors, no gears, no electrical actuation. The spars carry strain energy from the rolling process; releasing that energy extends the array autonomously, with fewer moving parts and therefore fewer failure modes than the rigid systems the station launched with. In the orbital environment, where thermal cycling swings temperatures from around -157°C (-251°F) in Earth’s shadow to 121°C (250°F) in direct sunlight, fewer moving parts matters: every hinge, motor, and gear interface is a potential failure point.
The practical result: each iROSA wing is about 20% lighter than a rigid array delivering equivalent power, and compresses to roughly one-quarter the volume — small enough to fit in the unpressurized trunk of a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule. Each wing generates more than 28 kilowatts at beginning of life.
There is one further wrinkle that made the 3B power channel modification necessary: iROSA wings do not replace the station’s original arrays. They install in front of them, angled slightly forward, augmenting rather than displacing the legacy panels, which continue generating power from their unshaded portions. That architecture means the 3B channel’s power management electronics must be updated to accept input from two sources simultaneously — the degraded original array and the fresh iROSA — rather than one. The modification kit Meir and Menon installed Thursday is the electrical interface that makes that dual-source input possible.
The iROSA program began in June 2021 as a direct response to a well-documented problem: the station’s eight original Solar Array Wings were designed for a 15-year operational lifespan, and by 2021 they had been operating for more than two decades. Their output had degraded significantly. NASA contracted with Boeing, and Boeing with Redwire, to build a new generation of arrays that could be delivered to the station in Dragon trunks and installed during spacewalks without requiring the station to take down its existing power hardware.
The first pair of wings went up in June 2021, installed during three spacewalks. A second pair followed in December 2022. A third pair was deployed in 2023, substantially improving combined power generation — a 30%-plus improvement over what the degraded original arrays could supply. The original six wings were procured through a $103 million modification to Boeing’s existing ISS engineering contract. The seventh and eighth wings — a fourth pair, contracted in June 2023 for just over $35 million — were delivered by Redwire to Boeing in January 2025.
Thursday’s work prepared the mount for the seventh wing. The 2A power channel — the remaining channel without an iROSA — will need a similar modification before the eighth wing can be installed. That work had not been announced as part of the August EVA series as of this article’s publication.
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The first six iROSA wings were about restoring the station’s degraded power capacity. The seventh is about something more specific: providing the electrical margin that NASA’s controlled deorbit plan requires. Running a 435-tonne (958,000-pound) orbital structure into a precise reentry corridor above the South Pacific requires powered attitude control, active avionics, and sustained interface with the SpaceX-built U.S. Deorbit Vehicle throughout what will be a multi-hour terminal sequence. That sequence requires power. The seventh iROSA provides it.
Roscosmos confirmed this month that ISS orbit lowering is scheduled to begin in 2028 using Russian Progress cargo spacecraft, with the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle executing the final burn in late 2030 to guide the station to the remote Pacific impact zone near Point Nemo. Thursday’s bracket installation is the first external step in that terminal sequence.
For Jessica Meir, Thursday was her sixth career EVA — a count that reaches back to October 18, 2019, when she and Christina Koch conducted the first all-female spacewalk in the history of spaceflight, replacing a battery charge-discharge unit on the station’s power system in a seven-hour, 17-minute excursion. She launched as commander of SpaceX Crew-12 in February 2026 and has since conducted five spacewalks from the station she commands, bringing her cumulative EVA time to 42 hours and 33 minutes.
Anil Menon took a different road to the Quest airlock. He holds a bachelor’s degree in neurobiology from Harvard University, a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and a medical degree from Stanford, and he serves as a Colonel in the U.S. Space Force. Before joining NASA’s 2021 astronaut class, he was SpaceX’s first-ever flight surgeon — the physician responsible for certifying launch crews as medically fit to fly — building the company’s flight medicine program from the ground up and serving as lead flight surgeon on five launches, including the Demo-2 mission that put the first crew aboard a Dragon capsule. He had also worked as a first responder after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, and the 2011 Reno Air Show accident.
There is a biographical detail that does not appear in Menon’s official NASA biography: his wife, Anna Menon, flew aboard the Polaris Dawn mission in September 2024 — the mission on which Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis conducted the first commercial spacewalk in history. Thursday was the day both members of their household have now flown in space — a distinction that, for now, belongs to no other family.
During the walk, Meir noted the Moon visible from the worksite and remarked on the distance they were helping the station travel — and Menon, looking toward the Moon from outside an orbiting laboratory 420 kilometers (261 miles) above Earth, said he could see a future lunar base from where he stood.
EVA-96 was the first of three U.S. spacewalks planned for August. U.S. Spacewalk 97 is scheduled for August 13 and will replace a Space-to-Ground communications antenna on the station’s exterior — the radio link that carries voice, high-definition video, and telemetry between the crew and Mission Control in Houston via NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System. U.S. Spacewalk 98 is scheduled for August 25 and will connect power and data cables as part of ongoing maintenance and replace a navigational aid on the Harmony module’s forward docking port used for spacecraft approach and berthing. NASA had not announced the crew assignments for those two upcoming spacewalks as of this publication.
Together, the three walks are oriented toward the same outcome: keeping a 26-year-old laboratory — the oldest continuously inhabited outpost in human history — functional, well-powered, and capable of leaving orbit on its own terms.
The pair assembled and installed the 3B modification kit — a mounting assembly consisting of six struts and a bracket — on the 3B Mast Canister on the far starboard (S6) segment of the station’s main truss. This hardware will accept the seventh iROSA wing when it arrives by Dragon cargo later in 2026. They also routed electrical cabling so the new array can feed power into the 3B channel once deployed, and applied multi-layer insulation to protect the new hardware from micrometeoroid impacts. The work completed all primary objectives within 6 hours and 27 minutes.
The iROSA uses composite boom spars — flexible rods made of carbon-fiber composite material — that are mechanically stressed when the array is rolled up for launch. The spars store that mechanical stress as what engineers call strain energy, essentially the same physics as a coiled spring. When the deployment command is given on orbit, the constraint holding the roll is released and the stored strain energy in the spars causes them to spring outward, unrolling the photovoltaic blanket autonomously. No motor drives the deployment. The 30.7%-efficient XTJ Prime triple-junction cells on that blanket each capture solar energy across three spectral bands simultaneously, enabling the compact form factor to generate more than 28 kilowatts per wing — more than what equivalent-output rigid arrays from the early 2000s could produce at a fraction of the mass and volume.
The controlled deorbit NASA has planned for end-of-2030 requires the station to actively manage its own reentry — maintaining attitude control, running avionics, and sustaining electrical interface with the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle while the vehicle executes its thruster burn. All of that demands power. The station’s original Solar Array Wings, designed for a 15-year lifespan, have been in orbit for more than 20 years and have degraded substantially. The seven iROSA wings (once the seventh is installed and deployed) will restore the power margin the station needs to execute a safe, precise reentry. Without adequate power, controlled deorbit over the remote South Pacific — the plan designed to protect populated areas from debris — becomes significantly harder to guarantee.
U.S. Spacewalk 97 is scheduled for August 13. It will replace a Space-to-Ground communications antenna on the station’s exterior. Live coverage is expected on NASA+, Amazon Prime Video, and NASA’s YouTube channel beginning approximately an hour before the scheduled start. NASA has not announced which astronauts will conduct EVA-97 or EVA-98 (August 25) as of this publication.
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