The IROSA solar array unrolls under during the Oct. 29 spacewalk under the watchful eye of astronaut Anil Menon. Image: NASA.
Over seven hours and 11 minutes, the alternating darkness and sunshine of low Earth orbit set the pace as NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk successfully installed and unfurled the seventh of eight new solar panels designed to power the outpost through its retirement in 2030.
“Night is dark and full of wonders,” one of the spacewalkers radioed after the hatch to the station’s airlock swung open.
Menon, 50, and Kutryk, 44, switched their spacesuits to battery power at 7:57 a.m. EDT and began repressurizing the Quest airlock at 3:08 p.m. EDT, ending the seven-hour, 11-minute outing. The pair finished the IROSA work far enough ahead of NASA’s planned timeline that they could tackle “get-ahead tasks,” including preparations for the final IROSA installation Nov. 5.
“The spacewalk was essentially flawless,” NASA Mission Control commentator Rob Navias said.
The extravehicular activity, or EVA in NASA parlance, was the 285th devoted to station assembly, maintenance and upgrades and was the first of two planned spacewalks to install the final pair of IROSAs. NASA says the eight arrays will raise the station’s available power from 160 kilowatts to about 215 kilowatts.
“Engineers and electrical officers here in Mission Control are happy with what they’re seeing from the new array, which will add 8 kilowatts to the overall power capability of the complex,” Navias said after the 60-foot solar panel unfurled from its rolled-up configuration over about 10 minutes.
Kutryk, making his first spacewalk after arriving on station Oct. 1 aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, became the fifth Canadian astronaut to walk in space and the first since David Saint-Jacques in 2019. It was Menon’s fourth spacewalk, bringing his total time spacewalking to 26 hours and 31 minutes, all of it logged since he arrived at the ISS aboard a Russian Soyuz in July.
The successful EVA brought NASA’s cumulative spacewalk time outside the station since assembly began in 1998 to 75 days, seven hours and 14 minutes, and brought 2026’s total number of spacewalks to eight.
Thursday’s operations got off to a quick start.
After Menon and Kutryk worked through a series of bolts to free the IROSA from the carrier it launched on, Menon locked his boots into a foot restraint affixed to the end of the station’s Canadian-built robotic arm, Canadarm2, and rode it, array in hand, out to the left, or port, side of the station’s main truss.
NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney piloted the arm from inside the station while Kutryk made his way to the installation site along the truss. Flight director Greg Whitney led the spacewalk from Mission Control in Houston.
By about three hours and 13 minutes into the spacewalk, the pair had the array installed at the P4 truss work site on a bracket astronauts previously installed during a March spacewalk. In all, Menon spent more than two hours anchored to the end of the station’s robotic arm before rejoining Kutryk on the truss.
Because the new array’s power cables can only be handled and hooked up to the station while it’s in Earth’s shadow, when none of the ISS’ solar panels are generating electricity, mission planners timed the cable work to coincide with orbital night.
During the first available nighttime pass — an entire eclipse earlier than planned, according to Mission Control — Menon and Kutryk connected three of the four main power connectors before the station slipped back into sunlight, where it would remain for about an hour.
That was no issue, as the spacewalkers were running “about an hour ahead of the timeline,” Navias said as the EVA neared the four-hour mark. At 12:20 p.m. EDT, Menon and Kutryk released the final restraints, and the IROSA began to unfurl — no motors required — thanks to energy stored in carbon-fiber composite booms.
Mission Control’s electrical engineers had already determined the array was safe to deploy with three of the power connectors mated, and Menon made the fourth and final connection during the next nighttime pass, after the array had unrolled.
During an Oct. 20 briefing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Garrett Hehn, the flight director who will lead the Nov. 5 spacewalk, likened the IROSA panels to a snap bracelet that, once released, “just continues rolling out steadily.”
“All of the work has gone very much by the book today,” Navias said during the roughly 10 minutes it took the IROSA to unfurl. “So far, so good.”
The two final arrays arrived at the station rolled up and folded on a carrier in the unpressurized trunk of a SpaceX Cargo Dragon, which launched Oct. 13 atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Each weighs about 750 pounds folded, according to Hehn.
“Overall, these roll-out arrays increase our power generation capability up to 30 percent,” Gaurang Patel, operations integration manager for NASA’s Low Earth Orbit Program, said at the Oct. 20 briefing.
Space shuttles delivered the station’s eight original solar wings, designed to last 15 years, between 2000 and 2009. Rather than replace them outright, NASA opted to mount the smaller IROSAs in front of the old wings, partly shading them while the original panels’ exposed portions keep producing power. Each IROSA generates about 8 kilowatts of electricity, according to NASA.
The first IROSA unrolled on station in June 2021, though not without a fight: A spacesuit glitch and an array that wouldn’t unfold cleanly forced astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Thomas Pesquet to finish the job on a second spacewalk. NASA refined the installation process during successive spacewalks, and by 2023, six arrays were in place. That summer, NASA ordered an additional pair — the seventh and eighth.
Menon and Kutryk plan to venture back outside the Quest airlock Nov. 5 to install the eighth and final IROSA at the far right, or starboard, end of the station’s main truss, beyond the reach of its robotic arm. Menon will again ride the arm as far as it will take him. To cover the last stretch, he and Kutryk will pass the array between foot restraints in a maneuver Hehn said the team “lovingly” calls “the leapfrog.”
“Everything today went almost better than could have been expected,” Navias concluded after Menon and Kutryk had returned to the station’s interior.
Safely inside the ISS, Menon reflected on what he called “an incredible milestone.”
“Well, being outside, I can say that it is always sunny in space, except for a few orbits,” Menon told Mission Control. “And it’s quite incredible what we’ve been able to do to provide new solar arrays to space station.”
In his first remarks after venturing into the vacuum of space for the first time, Kutryk was quick to thank Menon for “being a great spacewalking partner.”
“Been wonderful working with you,” Kutryk continued. “A very special thank you to our crewmates Jessica [Watkins] and Luke [Delaney]. Trusted them with our lives to get us in and out today … They did exactly that.”

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