CNN reports that NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara “marked their first spacewalk this month with a tool bag floating through space.” The pair “concluded their maintenance work outside the International Space Station (ISS) in six hours and 42 minutes, according to the space agency.” The spacewalk on November 1 “saw Moghbeli and O’Hara complete works on the station’s solar arrays, which track the sun, but they ran out of time to remove and stow a communications electronics box.” Leaving this task “for a future spacewalk, the pair instead conducted an assessment of how the job could be done.” During the mission, a tool bag “gave them the slip and was ‘lost,’ NASA said, with flight controllers spotting it using the ISS’ external cameras.” Fortunately, the tools “were not required for the remainder of their tasks.” According to EarthSky, “a website tracking cosmic events, the tool bag is currently orbiting Earth ahead of the ISS, and can potentially be spotted from Earth with a pair of binoculars during the next few months until it disintegrates in our planet’s atmosphere.”
Full Story (CNN)
