USA, June 26: The International Space Station (ISS) is a permanently manned Earth-orbiting station from 2000. It provides opportunities for unique scientific research and technological demonstrations. The continued operation of the orbiting platform was because of power generated by eight several solar panels creates an array) attached to it. Though they are functioning well, they are showing signs of degradation. So NASA is augmenting six new ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays (iROSA) to the existing ones. The installation of each solar array requires two spacewalks (any activity done by an astronaut outside a spacecraft) one to prepare the worksite with a modification and another to install the new array. NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet by subsequent spacewalks on June 16, 20 and, 25 have installed and deployed two new solar arrays. The last spacewalk lasted for 6 hours and 45 minutes. The eight current arrays are generating up to 160 kilowatts of power. Each new solar array will produce around 20 kilowatts of additional power.
