French astronaut Sophie Adenot on Tuesday became the first French woman to perform a spacewalk, carrying out a mission to repair a communications system on the International Space Station (ISS).
Adenot ventured outside the International Space Station accompanied by American astronaut Anil Menon.
NASA announced the extravehicular activity (EVA) mission last week and said the two astronauts will spend around six and a half hours outside the station, replacing a communications antenna that links the ISS with mission control in Houston, Texas.
This means Adenot is likely to circle the Earth more than four times. With the ISS completing an orbit roughly every 90 minutes, she could witness about four sunrises and four sunsets while working outside the station.
Mission preparations
"It will be my turn to head outside the station," Adenot, whose spacesuit weighs around 250kg, wrote on social media ahead of the spacewalk.
An EVA is “an adventure within the adventure”, she said at a press conference before travelling to the ISS.
The meticulous preparation for the EVA began months ago and included training in a swimming pool long before the astronauts left Earth.
Using a full-scale model of the ISS, Adenot learned safety procedures, including how to secure herself to the station, handle tools and communicate with her partner and mission control.
The 44-year-old astronaut has also spent recent days preparing aboard the station.
“A successful (spacewalk) starts long before the hatch opens, and that's where my focus has been these past few days: rehearsing, preparing and focusing,” Adenot wrote.
Fear and wonder
In a spacesuit, “every movement of the hand on a carabiner is like squeezing a tennis ball in half”, French astronaut Jean-Pierre Haigneré told public broadcaster Franceinfo.
Haigneré carried out a spacewalk in 1999 during the final mission to Mir, the predecessor to the ISS.
Astronauts who have completed EVAs describe them as both terrifying and awe-inspiring.
“When you leave the airlock and tip out into the void, 450 kilometres of nothingness, you need to have a strong heart,” Thomas Pesquet told France 2 television in January 2017. “But very quickly, your brain understands that you are not going to fall, that you are going to float.”
Pesquet, the most recent French astronaut to carry out an EVA, performed six spacewalks during two stays aboard the ISS. He said the work requires intense concentration. After a few hours, “I found myself looking up and taking in the Earth... and it was even more beautiful than from inside the station”.
Historic milestone
Flight engineer Jack Hathaway and station commander Jessica Meir will monitor the spacewalk and operate a robotic arm from inside the ISS, NASA said.
Adenot, an engineer and former test pilot, became the second French woman to travel into space in February after Claudie Haigneré, who flew missions in 1996 and 2001 but did not perform any EVAs.
She will also become the second European woman to perform a spacewalk after Italy's Samantha Cristoforetti, who did so in 2022.
International space cooperation is expected to be a key topic at the International Space Summit in Paris on 9 and 10 September.
The gathering, organised by France and Germany, is due to bring together major space powers and private-sector companies to discuss how to guarantee access to space while adapting international rules to the rapid expansion of commercial and government activity in orbit.
(with newswires)
