Sad news for those who were planning to watch NASA’s scheduled spacewalk at the International Space Station today, as it’s been delayed. The spacewalk, which<\/b>
\nSad news for those who were planning to watch NASA\u2019s scheduled spacewalk at the International Space Station today, as it\u2019s been delayed. The spacewalk, which was expected to begin today at 7:10 AM EST, was postponed at the last minute, thanks to the detection of nearby space debris. Unfortunately for us, NASA doesn\u2019t yet know when it will be able to perform the spacewalk and won\u2019t until it has more details about the debris and just what kind of threat it poses. Astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron (pictured below) were scheduled to participate in this spacewalk today, which would have seen them replacing an S-band Antenna Subassembly installed on the Port 1 truss structure off the ISS. While NASA says that the antenna in question \u201crecently lost its ability to send signals to Earth,\u201d the issue has only had a \u201climited impact\u201d on ISS functionality. Still, NASA wanted to replace the antenna to have communications redundancy in case other antennas went down. NASA blocked off a significant amount of time for Marshburn and Barron to perform their spacewalk and complete the antenna replacement, too, saying that the spacewalk was intended to last six and a half hours. Sadly, last night, NASA received a debris notification from the International Space Station, prompting it to delay the spacewalk. Image credit: NASA For now, we don\u2019t know when the spacewalk will happen. In an announcement published today, NASA says that the spacewalk will be delayed \u201cuntil more information is available.\u201d Since this mission was more about maintaining redundancy in the ISS communication systems rather than fixing a critical component, there\u2019s no major hurry to get the antenna replaced, so NASA can take all the time it needs to make sure that Marshburn and Barron won\u2019t have to contend with space junk while they carry out their mission. The debris in low-Earth orbit has been a big topic of discussion this month, thanks not only to this spacewalk delay but also because of the anti-satellite missile test Russia carried out earlier in November. On November 15th,2021, Russia destroyed its long-inactive Kosmos-1408 satellite, creating a debris cloud that potentially puts the crew of the ISS and the station itself at risk. The United States Space Command estimates that the explosion created at least 1,500 pieces of trackable space debris and many thousands more which are untrackable. The agency also said that the debris cloud could linger in low-Earth orbit for \u201cyears and potentially for decades.\u201d So far, there\u2019s been no indication from NASA that debris from that test is behind today\u2019s delay. The European Space Agency estimates there are tens of thousands of objects greater than 10cm in size in orbit, with potentially hundreds of millions of objects smaller than that. Those small, untrackable objects still pose a threat since they\u2019re moving at orbital speed, so it\u2019s no wonder NASA takes reports of debris seriously. We\u2019ll let you know when NASA has a new date for this spacewalk, along with details for how you can watch it live.<\/p>\n